The Electoral Integrity Project is an academic project based at

Royal Military College of Canada '') , established = 1876 , type = Military academy , chancellor = Anita Anand ('' la, ex officio, label=none'' as Defence Minister) , principal = Harry Kowal , head_label ...

and the

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...

which seeks to quantify the integrity of elections worldwide. The project freely publishes its Perceptions of Electoral Integrity dataset for scholarly use. It also organises international conferences and workshops. The most recent data and report release
Electoral Integrity Global Report
covers 480 elections in 169 countries from mid 2012 to the end of 2021. It is directed by Holly Ann Garnett and Toby S. James. It was founded by

Pippa Norris Pippa Norris (born 10 July 1953) is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and she has served as the Australian La ...

. The project received media attention in 2016 when it ranked the United States last among Western nations. One of the project's International Advisory Board, Andrew Reynolds, a political science professor at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

, noted in the Raleigh-based ''

News and Observer ''The News & Observer'' is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state (second is the ''Charlotte Observer''). The paper has bee ...

'' that his home state's election integrity score was similar to Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. The study ranked integrity of the state's congressional districts lowest in the nation just below similar outlier

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

. An editorial in ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' ridiculed the study, noting that "Democracy in New York (which scored a 61) and Virginia (60) is supposedly more imperiled than in Rwanda (64), though Rwanda is controlled by an autocrat. The worst-performing state, Arizona (53), is outranked by Kuwait (55), Ivory Coast (59) and Kyrgyzstan (54)."

Dylan Matthews Dylan Matthews is an American journalist. He is currently a correspondent for ''Vox (website), Vox'', an online media venture. Professional life Early writing In 2004, at the age of 14, Matthews launched a personal blog on politics and other is ...

writing in '' Vox'' agreed that "it seems foolish to infer from that that the US is less of a democracy than Rwanda" but felt that the EIP had highlighted important issues such as

gerrymandering In representative democracies, gerrymandering (, originally ) is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency. The m ...

and voter registration laws. Statistician

Andrew Gelman Andrew Eric Gelman (born February 11, 1965) is an American statistician and professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. Gelman received bachelor of science degrees in mathematics and in physics from MIT, where he was a ...

had a negative view of the PEI Index, commenting that " tall seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence", noting among other things that the EIP's 2014 data release has previously given the North Korean parliamentary election an 'electoral integrity' score of 65.3 and Cuba 65.6, higher than elections in EU members Romania and Bulgaria. Norris addressed the controversy in two long replies to Gelman, noting that her team had subsequently dropped the North Korean election from the dataset. Gelman, however, questioned her justification for this removal and continued to question the EIP's methodology more generally.

References

External links

* {{official, https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com
Perceptions of Electoral Integrity dataset
* doi:10.7910/DVN/YXUV3W Elections