ABSTRACT
Free, fair and regular elections stand at the very heart of representative democracy. They embody the two basic principles of the Democratic Audit—popular control of government and political equality in the exercise of that control. In the first Audit volume, The Three Pillars of Liberty, we assessed Britain’s arrangements for elections against international human rights standards (DA Volume No. 1: Chapter 14). There is an overlap between those standards and the criteria we have developed for auditing conformity with the two principles of popular control and political equality. Thus, the first volume substantially dealt with some of the questions posed by the first two Democratic Audit criteria:
DAC1. How far is appointment to legislative and governmental office determined by popular election, on the basis of open competition, universal suffrage and secret ballot; and how far is there equal effective opportunity to stand for public office, regardless of which social group a person belongs to?
DAC2. How independent of government and party control and external influences are elections and procedures of voter registration, how accessible are they to voters, and how free are they from all kinds of abuse?
