About
Elections around the world are becoming more litigious, increasing the pressure on courts to resolve politically charged disputes that may otherwise undermine the real or perceived integrity of electoral processes and outcomes. Despite this rising pressure on judges, access to judgments on specialized electoral cases can be limited, especially across jurisdictions where similar fact patterns may provide insights or precedential value. This lack of access to comparative judgments makes it challenging to develop regional and national jurisprudence in a way that increases the transparency and consistency of judgments and legal standards.
This searchable, curated database of national election judgments from around the world is intended to facilitate the exchange of sound precedents across jurisdictions. Designed for judges, election professionals, and researchers, each judgment added to the database includes a brief summary to provide a snapshot of the decision, as well as a link to the full written decision. Judgments can be searched by region, country, legal issue, language, court, and date.
IFES contributes judgments and resources discovered through ongoing programming or research. Judges and practitioners also contribute cases through the Global Network on Electoral Justice, the Europe/Eurasia Electoral Jurisprudence Network, and the Africa Electoral Jurisprudence Network. We welcome contributions to this database – please contact us here.
As a companion to the database, ElectionJudgments provides a curated collection of resources related to electoral integrity, electoral fraud and malpractice, and election dispute resolution. This includes applied research reports, international treaties, compilations of standards and principles, good practice guides, legal analyses, and case studies.
ElectionJudgments is managed by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). IFES is an international nonprofit dedicated to advancing good governance and democratic rights. For the last three decades, IFES has worked to support electoral justice systems to meet international and regional public law obligations; promote fair investigation and arbitration processes; and develop effective case management systems.
The development of ElectionJudgments was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Global Elections and Political Transitions (GEPT) Program. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
