The Global Election Monitor: Tracking Electoral Integrity Challenges and Innovations

The  Global Election Monitor (GEM) is the first interactive platform that provides an overview of 54 national elections during the 2024 elections super-cycle year and corresponding electoral integrity challenges and innovations in election administration. The GEM was launched on 31 March 2025 and is available on International IDEA website as a global public good.  

As election professionals and voters are confronted with challenges emanating from rapidly changing information environments, and increasing instances of extreme weather events, not to mention more familiar problems linked to issues like corruption, election related violence or human or technical error it can be difficult to develop a comprehensive overview of the latest developments and innovations in the field of election management. Therefore, the GEM dashboard, which includes 54 qualitative briefs on 2024 elections from all regions of the globe for the same calendar year, attempts to provide insights into seven electoral integrity challenges and their prevalence. The GEM dashboard is a user-friendly tool that allows users unfamiliar with the global election landscape to engage in global comparative analysis by accessing summaries of national elections, including any reforms the country has recently introduced.  

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Currently, GEM consists of 54 briefs covering national elections held in 2024. These briefs are structured around the electoral cycle and draw from reliable publicly available sources, mainly election observation reports, media outlets and material made available by election management bodies. Briefs are drafted by the international IDEA electoral processes team with the support of regional programmes. For comparative research purposes, the GEM dashboard primarily covers countries deemed free or partly free in terms of political rights and civil liberties or countries with high credible election scores as per International IDEA Global State of Democracy.   The GEM dashboard is designed with several objectives in mind. The first is to provide a one stop shop for qualitative summaries of elections and election related events in 2024, which are based on continuous media monitoring. The second objective is to identify and capture potential challenges to electoral integrity through a series of tags. Finally, by providing a straight-forward bibliography with publicly available material drawn from international and local media sources, the dashboard aims to be a resource which facilitates further research by its target audience, including election stakeholders, journalists, academics, and students.

It is important to note that the electoral integrity taxonomy has been developed over time and functions as way to capture and compare data on reported challenges and not to assess the severity or extent of a challenge in a given context. Analysing and providing an authoritative report on the causes, drivers and impacts of electoral integrity challenges requires in-depth, context specific research which exceeds the scope of a single dashboard. In addition, it can be difficult to capture a complex reality with a tagging taxonomy as many electoral integrity challenges can reinforce and exacerbate one another.  To help clarify how determinations about electoral integrity challenges are made for the purposes of the GEM dashboard International IDEA  has published the Global Election Monitor Codebook designed for users to get a better understanding of why certain national elections are tagged with a particular electoral integrity challenges. The codebook is open access and can be downloaded on International IDEA website.    

In addition to open-source reporting, GEM briefs draw on existing International IDEA Knowledge products, such as the Democracy Tracker, the Voter Turnout and Electoral System Design Databases. This allows the qualitative work of the GEM dashboard to build on and potentially reinforce the work done by the institute, ideally providing a mixed-methods base for a more complete picture of the state of global elections. Taken together these knowledge products help to inform other areas of our work on emerging challenges and resilience building in the electoral space, as well as providing an evidence base for publications like the International IDEA and Electoral Integrity Project Review of the 2024 Super-Cycle Year of Elections that was launched during the International IDEA 30th anniversary in June 2025.

Going forward International IDEA will continue to compile briefs on national elections for 2025 and further refine the methodology, building a dashboard that chronicles elections over time. The hope is to augment the focus on challenges to electoral integrity by increasing the focus on innovations in the electoral space. Ideally the GEM dashboard will grow as a tool for anyone interested in global elections and inspire further research which builds on its briefs and bibliographies.