Introduction

Elections are designed to fulfill important democratic tasks: they give citizens the power to select their leaders, facilitate the transfer of power and hold politicians accountable for their decisions. However, this process can easily break down: incumbents manipulate electoral rules to their advantage, election day is wrought with vote-buying and ballot-box stuffing and ballots go missing during the count. Scholars and practitioners have long sought to make sense of the ways that elections can be threatened by finding methods of measuring the quality of elections. But when considering such a variety of activities and responsibilities that go into elections, there are also a plethora of ways that elections, throughout the electoral cycle, can fail. Incumbent regimes are more easily able to manipulate the entire state apparatus to pass laws and develop procedures that will sway an election in their favour.