An essential element of most media regulatory bodies, during election periods and at other times, will be a complaints procedure. This is the means by which the public, political parties and the media themselves can seek adjudication on alleged breaches of the law or regulations on election coverage. Since the election period is usually short, complaints mechanisms are usually geared towards a speedy resolution of a complaint. If, for example, it concerns a factual inaccuracy that may influence voters' intentions, there is little use in correcting the error once the election is over.
Complainants will always have the right to take whatever legal proceedings are laid down in the country's laws - a civil suit claiming defamation, for example. And there should always be a built-in appeal process that allows disappointed complainants or the media themselves to seek a higher judgement from an independent court of law. But in general the emphasis is likely to be on a speedy, no-cost, non-confrontational resolution of disputes. This may be particularly important in a situation in which hostility between parties or communities is great and there are likely to be many issues of dispute. For example, the complaints mechanism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Election Appeals Sub-Commission (EASC), was able to deal rapidly with a whole series of complaints referred to it by the Media Experts Commission (MEC) in the 1998 presidential election. This helped to reduce tensions between the different communities, by not allowing disputes between their different parties and media to escalate. This was especially important in light of the significant role played by the media in instigating political violence in the former Yugoslavia.
The variety of complaints procedures is as great as the number of different types of regulatory body. There may not even be a single uniform procedure. Britain, for example, has a statutory Broadcasting Complaints Authority to deal with the electronic media and a voluntary Press Complaints Council with responsibility for the print media. Neither of these is confined to elections in its mandate. The advantage of a specialized election complaints body is that it will be geared to the need for speedy resolution of disputes. The Nicaraguan Supreme Electoral Council, for example, receives complaints and, through its Mass Media Department, issues private rulings to the media outlets against which findings are made. It only publicizes the ruling if the media organ fails to comply.56 In Montenegro, by contrast, publicly-funded media are obliged to publicize any findings of the competent authorities 'about any infringement on the principles of equality and objectivity relating to informing citizens on agendas and candidates...' See Montenegro: law on state election broadcasting.
Few complaints systems are quite as elaborate as the Russian. The Judicial Chamber for Information Disputes is not a specialized election complaints body, although it arose because of the need for a body to deal with disputes that arose during the 1993 parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum. Its predecessor was the Arbitration Court on Information Matters that had been set up specifically to deal with election disputes.57 See Complaints Procedure - Russia.
