Before surveying the various approaches used to measure electoral quality it is useful to identify some of the primary actors interested in these measurements and their objectives.

• Election management bodies (EMBs) have a legal obligation to properly implement the electoral law and will be primarily concerned with the activities of its own personnel and the conduct of their responsibilities in delivering the elections.
• Police and the judiciary may need to collect data on violations of the electoral law and develop monitoring and liaison operations with other actors in the electoral process. The judiciary may have a constitutional or legal responsibility to review and declare election results or to resolve election disputes.
• Political parties and candidates are not only interested in winning or losing elected office but may also have intermediate goals to build their party’s base, extend their presence into new parts of a country, spread their message to new voters or increase their share of the vote. While political parties and candidates tend to focus their energy on the voter register, ensuring their supporters get to the polls, and assessing the conduct of polling and counting operations through the deployment of individual poll watchers (agents or witnesses).
• Civil society and international election observer missions (EOMs from multilateral and regional organizations, governments, international non-governmental organizations and national, non-partisan, civil society organizations) conduct direct observation of some or all parts of the electoral process.
• Election technical assistance providers not only assess the area in which they are working but may also evaluate other areas that intersect with their work (e.g. gender and electoral justice or training of political party agents and the conduct of the polls) as well as the credibility of the overall electoral process. Technical assistance providers want to assess the impact of the assistance to determine what has worked, what may be improved in the future and how processes have changed over time. They may also want to contribute to the ongoing development of best practices in many aspects of election administration.
• Media – domestic and international – combine first and second hand reports gathered from a wide range of sources to cover elections and often commission public opinion polls. The media is mostly driven by reporting on real-time and immediate political and electoral events judged to be most pertinent, but they may also provide important voter information.
• Academics and scholars provide political analysis of many aspects of elections and democracy, through a range of methodologies, including election results analysis, public opinion surveys and focus groups.
• Intergovernmental organizations, governments, and donor agencies participate in election assessment in many ways, ranging from meeting membership obligations to supporting foreign policy to providing funding and other services to the conduct of elections.  They may also participate directly in election observation.
• Individual voters form their own impression of electoral quality, particularly from the point of view of whether or not their preferred candidate or party has won. They rely on a range of sources in addition to personal experience, drawing on talk with neighbors, what they learn from the media, political parties, EMB, government and others. Collectively they form the “public” which is often invoked by others who assess elections and with whom they may or may not have consulted in systematic ways.