Judith Kelley (2012:16-17)
demonstrates that the sharpest rise in number of missions conducted annually
worldwide occurred between 1989 (30 percent of elections) and 1991 (46
percent).[i] The end of the Cold War provided an opening for
election observation to boom and for more organizations to join the field,
including the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) in 1992 and
the European Parliament in 1994. By the late 1990s, regional, non-Western
actors were active, including the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL),
the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the South African
Development Community (SADC), and the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa,
later changed to the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa
(EISA).[ii]
The spread of observation and proliferation of groups put
pressure on national leaders to allow monitoring in their countries or, in
other terms, brought governments to realize the utility. As Susan Hyde
(2011:109) notes, even undemocratic leaders (like Noriega in Panama) became
willing to invite observers based on the benefits of foreign aid and
relationships that could come after a positive assessment, at the risk of being
caught red-handed at manipulation.[iii]
Kelley (2012:31) adds: “Election monitoring continued to spread because
external actors increased democratic conditionality and because the stigma
associated with not inviting monitors motivated even cheating governments to
invite monitors to avoid an automatic stamp of illegitimacy.”[iv]
Yet, as more countries became open to observation, observer groups with
increasing depth of expertise also demonstrated greater willingness to issue
critical reports. In the 1980s, international observer groups only questioned
seriously the legitimacy of an electoral process four times. In the 1990s, the
number of negative reports rose sharply to a high of 16 elections in 2000.[v]
Increased confidence in observers’ assertions of fraud could
be due in part to the honing of statistical methods over the same period.
Parallel vote tabulations (PVTs) can project results ahead of official
announcements or verify their accuracy based on an independent count of a
statistically significant sample. PVT is discussed in detail above in section
2.3.
[i]
Kelley, Monitoring
Democracy, 16-17.
[iii]
Hyde, Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma, 109
[iv]
Kelley, Monitoring Democracy, 31.
[v]
Hyde, Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma, 112.
