Acknowledgments

This guide was written by Michelle Brown, Elana Kreiger-Benson, Michael McNulty, and Samantha Moog with input from Meghan Fenzel and Sunila Chilukuri, and with overall guidance from Patrick Merloe. Jessica White performed extensive research on the data available in Latin American countries. Website development and programming was done by Irakli Naskidashvili with input from Phil Brondyke. NDI wishes to thank the many electoral management bodies whose perspective and comments have been reflected in this document. NDI also wishes to thank the many citizen election observation groups, including the organizational and regional network members of the Global Network of Domestic Election Monitors (GNDEM). GNDEM currently includes more than 200 members from 82 countries and regional networks from Africa, Asia, Europe and Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

The first and third sections of this guide, on electoral integrity and key election processes, respectively, are based on the extensive experience and work of Patrick Merloe and draw heavily from his handbook, Promoting Legal Frameworks for Democratic Elections. The second section, on open election data principles, owes a great debt to, and draws upon, the solid intellectual foundation set by Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition, the "8 Principles of Open Government Data" issued in the 2007 workshop of open government advocates, Joshua Tabeuer's Open Government Data: The Book, the Sunlight Foundation's Open Data Policy Guidelines and the examples set by the Open Government Partnership (OGP), Google.org and the Transparency & Accountability Initiative (TAI), among others.

The development of this guide was supported through a grant from Google Inc.[1] This guide complements other resources available on electoral integrity and election observation, such as NDI's handbooks: The Quick Count and Election Observation (concerning parallel vote tabulations - PVTs); Building Confidence in the Voter Registration Process; Media Monitoring to Promote Democratic Elections; Monitoring and Mitigating Electoral Violence through Nonpartisan Citizen Election Observation; and How Domestic Organizations Monitor Elections. Additionally, NDI, with support from Google Inc., has developed a series of tutorials to help election monitoring organizations make better use of available election data. These and other resources are available at www.ndi.org/elections.

  1. This publication is made possible by the generous support of Google Inc. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Google Inc. ↩︎