Electoral Management Survey

The Electoral Management Survey is a survey of electoral authorities worldwide about how elections are run in their country. It gathers data which is not easily accessible via other methods e.g. in laws or on websites. We ask one member of a national electoral management body in each country to complete the survey on behalf of their organisation.

We have run surveys in 2017-8 in collaboration with A-WEB and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe which focussed on EMB structure, resources, capacity and personnel.

We ran second survey in 2021 in collaboration with International IDEA on how elections were run during the pandemic.

A third survey was ran in 2024.

The surveys aim to:

  • Combines the requests for information from as many partners as possible to reduce the burden on electoral officials.

  • Is regular and periodic so that it can be expected

  • Focus on added value to existing datasets

  • Focus on information not available elsewhere e.g. because it has a technical nature or because the perceptions of the EMB are requested.

  • Be short and easy to complete

  • Ask questions EMBs can answer and not require responses from multiple departments, if possible

survey ResourceS from previous rounds

For outputs of previous surveys, please see:

Datasets

Policy reports

Academic outputs

Electoral Management Around the World

Report and Dataset by Toby S. James, Holly Ann Garnett and Sonali Campion