 Good morning to everybody who is joining us. We'll just wait 30 seconds. So before we start, different attendees are trickling in now. We're waiting for one other of these speakers. So just we'll start in about 30 seconds. So good day to everybody or good morning, good afternoon, good middle of the night, wherever you happen to be. Welcome to you and thank you for joining us for this webinar, Tide of Elections, Creating Momentum in the Face of Electoral Fatigue. This is the first event actually of over 40 that will be held today. Those 40 events are organized in the context of the Global Democracy Coalition Forum, 24-hour event ahead of the Summit for Democracy, which will take place on the 9th and 10th of December. So Thursday and Friday this week. This event is launched right now. It is designed to galvanize attention conversation about democracy ahead of the Summit. You can tweet about it by using the hashtag Global Democracy Coalition. There is also a website of the same name, globaldemocracycoalition.org, where you can find out about the other events and you're very welcome to join those other events over the course of the next 24 hours. Now for us conscious of the fact that there will be many events today, we are organizing a rather different format, a conversation among eight participants. Now those eight participants are experts in the area of democracy support and elections. My name is Ken Godfrey. I'm the Executive Director of the European Partnership for Democracy and these conversation participants who are here with us today are also linked to EPD, the members or part of the network with some of our members. Now each of these participants, you're very free to all of you to jump in when you want in terms of the conversation. We have a series of four questions to structure the discussion. But if we veer off from those questions then that's also okay. Now we're here to discuss basically the fact that there is a trend of autocratization across the world and elections have been viewed and I think are an opportunity to arrest democratic decay in many countries. They're viewed as an opportunity for change. At the same time, in other countries they're also viewed as a barrier to change and people protest, they view elections as outdated, they don't have the right choices. And so here we'd like to discuss that through those four questions. Those four questions are, what are the global trends in terms of elections? Why are elections still so important for democracy? Third, what are the most difficult areas of democracy support linked to elections? And finally, what steps can different actors, international, national, local, what steps can they take following elections? We want to mix analysis with practical suggestions. We may not all agree with each other at all times but that's the point of us being here with a wide variety of speakers. I'll just introduce all of them first to call out their names before we begin. We have Tanya Holstein from the Westminster Foundations for Democracy, John Inge Lovedal from the Oslo Centre, Michele Laudere from electionwatch.eu, sorry for butchering your surname, Michele. Matthias Pazbeck-Skibdal, I'm doing a good job there, from DIPD, the Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy, Domenico Tukinardi from the Edge Foundation, Gary Klauker from Demo Finland, Nino Dolidze from the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy, and finally, Michele Mayer-Zende from Democracy Reporting International who has not been able to join us yet. So I wanted, just to let you know that there's a Q&A function, so you can ask us some questions directly if you would like to through that Q&A function. We'll try to get to them, but we do have a conversation to start before then. So I wondered if anyone could take the floor first, chip in with, although Michele has now joined us who's actually written about this before. So we'll begin now, if we can give a sort of introduction. I hope that's clear to everybody here and to hear us in terms of these participants and speakers. So we'll start with our first question. What are the global trends in terms of elections? I want to thank that somebody would take the floor. Michele, Michael, Mayer-Zende, you've written about this before, so please feel free to take the floor to kick us off, but also others if you'd like to step in, and please do. Hi, Ken, good morning. I'm really sorry I was in another meeting that took longer with a conference in Pakistan. If you would just choose one before me, and then I come in that I organize myself for one second. No problem, please. No worries. I hope that the meeting in Pakistan went well. Others, if there's somebody who'd like to come in, then please do so. Domenico, please. Well, I mean, thanks for this invitation, thanks for this provoking title, Tide of Elections. I think we love looking forward to hearing from Michael about what the major challenges that he has written about. I mean, I think we all feel the pressure in daily programs, daily assistance activities. However, I mean, if we accept the, I mean, I just want to start with a counter-totent. If we accept the premise that democracy remains a global aspiration with its multiples ways to present itself, to manifest itself, sometimes very perfectable, very improbable. It does remain as the best known way to achieve global goals of democracy, freedom, equality, and probably to facilitate sustainable development. If we accept this as a global premise, I think we need to acknowledge, we need to remain engaged in the electoral support in general and dwell into the various challenges of it. I mean, to me, nothing like democracy, the events provide the litmus test for the state of democracy in a given country. And I'm saying that after having spent the last 15 years promoting the concept of the process, of looking at electoral assistance as the process-oriented programming, not as event-oriented activities. However, without the event, we would not have the process. Yeah, it's a good chat, yeah. A chat on how the system is doing, indeed. Yeah, maybe I'll stop there just to start to kick off the conversation. Very good, very good. Others? Michael, please, yeah. Yeah, thank you. And thank you, Dominico, also, for buying me some time here. Yeah, I just would make four points, not all maybe completely joined up, but I think what I find interesting, we see in the last years, in the last 10 years, basically a very big increase of social unrest. So you have lots of trackers for that from Carnegie and from others. And they all say that there's a very tangible increase of social unrest all around the world. And I think it chimes in with the experience we have when we look around. There are lots of big demonstrations in many countries, et cetera. And at the same time, in exactly the same period, we have an ongoing decline of democracy. So this is somehow two movements that is hard to explain if you want, why on the one hand so much mobilization and on the other hand, a steady decline in democracy. And somehow for me, the connection between the two has something to do with elections in the sense that all these protests or the social mobilization doesn't seem to achieve the institutional change that it's looking for. And that is, I think, one big question to ask ourselves, why is there so much mobilization that doesn't seem to achieve its objectives? And normally we would say, well, that's what elections are for. And why don't elections achieve that point? And I think that's something interesting to look at. So social mobilization, that doesn't bring change. And normally we would have thought social mobilization turns into certain election results that then engineer that change. So there's something that's not working in this connection. And one element of that, I think one obvious explanation is, of course, increasing authoritarian wave around the world that makes sure that elections do not achieve that objective, basically, that freeze in ruling parties or ruling politicians. And then the second trend that I would just like to mention is, I still read lots of articles that always say, turn out it's going down, turn out it's going down. We are reading this for 50 years and it's a crisis of democracy talk, but it's not so true anymore. There are quite many countries where turn out is actually going upwards. And not all of them for sure, but quite many. And again, I think it has to do with societies being more politicized and also more polarized. And I wouldn't consider all of that negative because polarization in some way is good for democracy that people feel there's a real choice and makes a difference, whether I vote for A and B. It only becomes pernicious when it gets extreme the way we have seen it in the US. And of course, it's not any more positive polarization, but polarization, I think, seems to push turn out upwards. So that's maybe a little bit of good news on the election front. And the third issue that I see and it's maybe still quite weak, but I think it's worth mentioning when we talk about elections is the whole question of how we see election. And I do see interrogation of whether questions are actually a good institution of democracy. And it's raised in softer or harder ways, I think from many people who are involved with the whole climate debate. And there are just many people that will feel democracy hadn't delivered enough on this emergency and it's not working. And there's also a line of thought that says traditional politics is just too much part of the carbon status quo and of very strong lobbies and that elections cannot break that. And many of these people give huge faith into citizen assemblies and feel that this is a much more authentic way of engaging with people. It's a much deeper way and it's a less corrupted way because you have no lobbies in the room basically. And I don't believe in this. I think citizen assemblies are really good innovation and very important. And I see why many people are very positive about them. I'm also positive about them, but I see them as a compliment. And then the last point, which is not a trend, is I think we as people who all support elections in many countries around the world feel that the challenge has become much more complex. 20 years ago, it was often a relatively technical challenge. It's not working well. Election commissions have to know better how it works. Parties have to engage in a more effective way in elections and these kind of questions. And now we have additional challenges that just many actors who try to convince you, convince electorate that elections are not worth it or that they are rigged. I mean, again, the United States, you have a losing party that says they are rigged. And we have to make decisions and we have to have opinions, whether we think sometimes elections are rigged. So, but there's a much bigger ideological struggle, I think, around each elections, whether you want to accept the process or you don't want to accept that process. And I think it turns into real detailed challenges again for our interlocutors and let's say election commissions, which have been a key part of our interlocutors and institutions we try to support. And suddenly they have to work or address this wave of often disinformation on social media that tries to trash that institution, the election commission and tries to trash an election and that's a totally new challenge. And that's not something we have dealt with in the past when we helped them to build better voter registers or with election day process or election appeal, some complaints in that context are very important. So I think in this field, like in all fields of democracy support, we have a new challenge which is trying to roll back. And I think sometimes we have to think also about our theory of change. So we are defending actually institution is a bit different from the traditional, we just support institutions to do a better job. So this is just some thoughts to kick us off. Thank you very much. Thanks, yeah, I think you very aptly described the sort of the dilemma that we're facing, the sort of the fact that many people feel as though elections are not working. So what can we do to sort of encourage or help those elections to better address some of the challenges to the functioning of democracy? John, I have your hand up and then Matias, please John. Yeah, thank you, Michael. I just have one question to you about trends because, and I'm not sure if I'm 100% correct in what I'm saying, but I think this is about throwing up questions or ideas and concerns. I mean, I think one thing that we also have seen maybe in some individual cases, but I think that quite a number is that while you have the election and you might have high turnout, the election result is somehow decided through more of a judicial process about political negotiations, having a political settlement after the election because you couldn't agree on the election outcome or the electoral process. So I'm also thinking about like, how does that kind of, what is the impact of those, if that's a trend or if it's just isolated cases on how does that relate to election as that event or that part of democracy where people are really asked to come out and to decide who should represent them, who should talk on behalf of them when we see that maybe the final result is being decided through the court system or through negotiations. Does that mean that we also need to think a bit wider when it comes to preparation? I mean, I think we work with judiciary, but is it more important to also work with that section? I mean, again, back to the whole process thinking in the lead up to the election, et cetera, et cetera. So that's my question. Thanks, John. Michael, would you like to try to answer or Matthias or Domenico if you have reaction to that? Let's give Michael the chance to answer first. Yeah, I know we have many speakers. So I thought we go through and then we discuss together, but I can just briefly come in on this. I think, John, I see, I mean, different stories. If we have election that are decided by courts, that I would interrogate a bit for me. This is the working of the rule of law and courts have the rights in most countries and rightly so to review an electoral process and see whether it was correct or not. And we had the very obvious and high level ones in the US, Georgia or something endless appeals and all the courts said, no, no, no, no, no, this was okay. And I think that's perfectly fine. And I think it's also fine for courts to say in some instances, sorry, there were too many problems here and they may have impacted the results and we have to rerun an election. And it doesn't mean that they decide the result, but they decide they make a decision about the process. Here in Berlin, it's possible we have to rerun our last elections for Berlin because they were just lots of technical problems and that's perfectly okay. I think the court decides on that. The political settlement is a different issue. And I think that we know, of course, from conflict countries. And I think this is a much more complex subject. It's where often our community who looks at intellectual integrity then gets in a certain tension maybe with the peace building, mediation and high level political processes which say, well, we have to preserve the peace and we feel well, but we can also encourage losers to pick up the gun and say, I don't accept it. Let's now talk political agreement because I didn't like the results. And I think that's a very fine line often and very complicated. But to discuss it as a trend, I don't have enough data in my head now to say something about it. I think often it's a bit of case-by-case situation. Thanks, Michael. And this is the spirit. This is what we want, engagement between people. So that's very good. Matthias, you had your hand up first and then Domenico, then Nino, then Tanya. Please, Mathias. Thank you. And thank you, Michael, for highlighting a few of the many challenges that I think all of us agree that we are facing now, the global democracy. I think I just wanted to take the chance today to highlight one question which I think is overarching for all of us and that is what comes next and what happens now because we all know the challenges. They're well documented by now. I'm a fairly young man still. I was born in 84, meaning I was seven years old when the Berlin Wall fell, meaning so throughout my entire adolescence and youth, I've seen democracy rise around the world and we are now back to square one, I feel. I mean, the trust in politicians is an all-time low. I'm living in Denmark, one of the most stable and representative democracies in the world and the trust level in politicians at 15%. I mean, we usually say it's way below used car salesmen. So I think that's alarming. The members and political parties have left. I mean, there are no members left, the platform is gone. Political parties are no longer what they used to be, especially in the western part of the world, but the challenges are the same in many of the developing countries that we engage with. So what comes next? And I truly believe even though I come from organization, tend to focus more on the time between elections instead of the time during elections. I think elections remain pivotal in the defense and development of democracies. As you said, Michael, actually there are tendencies towards greater voter turnout. People demand democracy. They demand different types of, especially direct democracy involvement. You also mentioned citizen assemblies. There are other ways of including the citizens more directly in the democratic process, but people want to get involved. People demand democracy. They demand to get their vote counted in a free and fair manner. So I think as a democracy supporting institution, of course we should still focus on elections. Of course we should defend free, fair and transparent elections, but we should also work with the organizations that reach out to citizens or should reach out to citizens before, during and after elections. Political parties, election commissions. As you said, John, the political sector also to ensure that everything is free and fair and transparent. But as we as organizations, because I'm also saying this, many of you have worked in this sector for way more years than I have. And unfortunately, all our good efforts, well, we're not reaping the fruits at the moment. I truly believe that we should, we have to re-evaluate how we engage in a different area of the era of democracy. So I also hope this event today can be sort of a starting point for this conversation, which is already going on in various forums and where we try to revitalize our own approach to elections and to democracy support in between elections. Thank you, Matisse, also for pointing out that this is a global trend. It's within the European Union, outside of the European Union, around the neighborhood of the European Union, but also pretty much all corners of the world. Domenico. Yeah, yeah, sure. I think a lot of interesting points that have been raised already on the reasons. Maybe on the point raised by, what to connect point first by John or Michael on the process and the participation or the concurrence of other institutions in altering or determining the outcome of elections. It's probably during many post-conflict or in many post-conflict situations or in countries where we have, we have, let's say, authoritarian tendencies developing. And it's true that many have looked, many, many also autocrats have learned how to look at elections as a process themselves. So they've perfected themselves ways to maintain their grip and power through controlling other institutions, not just the electoral management model. Judiciary could be one, could be other institutions that are part of the, part of the state that have an influence on the election. And the challenge then for electoral systems, democracy systems generally is how to move beyond the technical states without forgetting the technical state. These technical states as probably a number of other ramifications that we have not yet fully developed in assistance. I mean, how can one support national electoral commissions in providing a better service during campaign or monitoring campaign in enforcing campaigns and making sure that the extensions have been paid or again, how to improve the support that they provide in political party funding and now the monitoring political party funding which is an entire new world and very complex for the electoral system. And again, how to improve communication between electoral commissions and political parties in general beyond the immediate, the close electoral sphere. So these are areas of possible assistance that are still very technical in a way. They still don't, they still, but they do provide a way to enter and to enter into areas that are always gray and increase the transparency of the process and making very difficult then for the authoritarian regimes to not to disclose or to ignore what abuses of state resources in various ways could mean. Thanks Domenico, those concrete areas to focus on. Nino, the floor is yours. You've been waiting patiently. Yes. Thank you very much. It's really very interesting discussion. And here I wanted to answer the question of John and also Domenico touched these issues. So I'm coming from Georgia and this is the country which has bucket of everything what we were talking here. And it's very interesting to share experience of Georgia and to refer to our question, people are tired or not of elections. And I'm coming from the country where we have elections almost every year. And we can say that really, yes, people are tired of elections but they are tired of elections not because that we have elections every year but unfortunately it's getting more and more difficult to make changes with elections every year. So whenever we are talking about elections from different countries, it's very much important to consider elections which are conducted in these developing countries, democratic developing countries like Georgia. And also to think if election results really reflect the will of people. And here what I am talking is that in Georgia for example, electoral system doesn't really allow people to reflect their will. And because we have system which is mixture of for example, proportional and majoritarian system and proportional wise, people really do not support in any political party to have more than 50% but unfortunately during our independence 30 years we are getting almost every time one party majority which brings Georgia to have one party having all state institutions under control including election administration, including the judiciary. So whenever we are talking about elections results and whether there is trust or not trust with election results it's very difficult to even appeal about election results because then you are going to the judiciary which is also control of under one party. So in Georgia really people are very much frustrated and I do not say that there is one party who they want to support but unfortunately when you have parliamentary election where one party has for example even 48% but not more than majority. They have almost constitutional majority in government almost I am saying that they are ruling all the state institutions. So here I want to rise the role of international stakeholders because this is one hour topic. Whenever in country people do not have trust towards election administration also trust towards state institutions and if you look at polls political parties have also very low trust from citizens. Here we can say that only hope in this country like country like Georgia is international stakeholders who are for example observing elections and then assessing our elections. And in this case we are really much looking what will be their assessments and what will be their recommendations and how they follow up on the recommendations. It is very much important recently we have been like listening from our international friends that assessments are kind of the same type whether we have good elections or bad elections diplomatic language is always kind of balanced they do not openly say. So I think this is something we should be looking for and asking for our international stakeholders because for example I am from domestic observer group and like we always say very loudly what are the problems but it is very important that our international partners like kind of echo and say very openly because everybody I mean citizens of these people are looking what international observers say and citizens are looking and sometimes they are really frustrated because whatever we get assessment both sides and because we have this high polarization they are interpreting how they want. I would rise this topic as a discussion we have very good example of eumediation process which ended last year political crisis but still political parties are not responsible and accountable even to this agreement. And I think we should think about how to follow up on this assessment of international organizations and how to make governments who are not implementing recommendations to be more accountable to these recommendations. This is question and like discussion topic which we can also continue thank you. Thanks very much Nino. Well we have some people who are very well versed here on election observation we've done it for many years so it would be very interesting to hear from them in terms of that I guess kind of critique of the fact that maybe they're not forthright enough sometimes in their assessments. So Tanya maybe you could even tackle that what you'll say because you're next in line but if others would like to come in on that please also let me know. Tanya please. Thanks again. Yeah I wanted to start just answering or saying something towards Michael's trends or the ones he identified on the one on assemblies, citizen assemblies. I concur with Michael on the fact that they are very important but they're an add-on. I also, I am also of the opinion that institutions are the way forward because institutions can be hold accountable. Citizen assemblies that's a very different set of things and having said that they need to be hold accountable I think with the institution of the election management body we are facing a huge problem of having this institution basically working in vacuum in some of the cases. So you have electoral processes, donors look at electoral processes and they look at the election institution which might be independent, might not be independent which is one of the problems creating trust amongst citizens. And the independence question is something that really needs to be looked at a little bit more the de facto independence which I need to say because some of them are independent on paper. Lots of them have it in the name and it's also a trick very often by governments to name them independent but they're not. So the de facto independence is something we need to look at. Then having said that in a second level I mean these institutions when they do work and also coming back to Michael and others yes they are the technical part of an election but they're only one part and if we look at the set of electoral integrity or the goal of electoral integrity which we potentially tried to approach at one point then the technical assistance to election management bodies is one thing but there is a whole other side of things which we tend not to look at enough is the electoral environment of which the election management body is one part and there is parties, media, civil society, external actors, everything which plays into a political process and with this we need to support the election commissions, their independence and their work and their interaction within this environment more so that we get away from this technical support and then we could also include civil society much better and have them as Michael lined out in the beginning they mobilized but nothing is changing and then I'm coming to what Nino said nothing is changing because first of all the election commission is not always the center point for change. It's very often the parliament and as we heard before as well they might not want to do it because it's against their interests when they come to office but then again if we involve the whole electoral environment then there is a broad coalition of groups and people to push for these different changes so you don't have separate groups of citizens coming forward and be disappointed and frustrated at the end because they would work within a larger conglomerate of moving parts within a society and that is something I think we should look at and look into a little bit more and coming there to the reform bit and if you do electoral reform this is nothing that needs to be done only on a technical side electoral reform has to be inclusive and it's a long-term process and we did some research in WFD to see what would work and what would not work and one important thing that came out of the research is that election recommendations are more often implemented where civil society is already organized and working and two specific topics not all of the topics of course and we just need to harvest this a little bit more and put it throughout the electoral cycle not only eight months prior or eight months but all the time support the election institution and their independence throughout the electoral cycle as well as civil society all the way through and do it in a consultative process to get away from this technical vacuum and just create something more on a governance integrated governance support structure. Thank you very much, Tanya really highlighting that the I guess the somehow the environment itself around the election and the fact that I think it builds on what was said earlier also by Domenico that process point but also including these different actors and now we have lots of hands up so if there's anybody who's reacting to a point that somebody has just made then please let me know or just unmute yourself and take the floor because there's lots it's a very rich discussion there's a lot that we're building on here. Next in line, John please and then Gareth. Yeah, just very quickly because I just wanted to support what Tanya was talking about. I mean it is, I mean while elections are technical it's basically a political process. And I think that and then sometimes support and assistance to the election comes too late and sometimes it's hard to say this as an implementing partner but sometimes also too much money too late. So I think that the focus more on the political environment and I think that and then to build trust. And I agree with what Domenico was saying about like code of conducts, all of that aspect but of course that needs to start much, much early and you need to have stakeholders engaged in that process of developing those code of conducts to create the ownership. And then I think that there is also one element that we often don't talk too much about we talk about political parties but we don't talk about the candidates because the candidates often run their own life during the campaign period which might not be so much linked to the party. And then finally, I think there is also another element that we haven't touched upon and that's corruption which of course is a big topic in all of this and the money involved in politics the money involved in what Nino was somehow referring to. So I think that's my point on this but it's about the politic that it is a process it's the whole kind of environment where election is part of it is an important part of it they were important actors but they forget the rest we might also then have challenges related to election as an event. And I think that's the basic, the bottom line of what we are discussing which I think is very important. Thank you very much John. I think, Michael you also unmuted yourself because you were coming in in response to the previous point. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct but I'm happy to give Gary the floor he had his hand up earlier and then I come in. Whichever way works best. Yeah, perhaps I can briefly say Matisse referred to the optimism in the 1990s. I also was born in 1984 and I remember the heydays of the 90s when history was over and democracy was a done deal but indeed it's important to look at the current context where the challenges are enormous and I think as a community of practice we've got quite far in indeed having identified the issues and having come up with concrete solutions and this week indeed with the summit coming up is about finding those kinds of solutions. I wanted to bring in the perspective of political parties now democracy and elections are various big concepts and you can't have them without these individual elements and political parties are an absolutely crucial one in that. They are the ones who select candidates and then field them to the elections. There is the lack of trust which has been a global trend for quite some time and political parties I feel are in a very, very critical position in so many countries where the membership has declined. There is the lack of trust and parties themselves have to be able to find ways to reform and to get particularly the younger generations to join in again. A term that a British politician used with me some time ago was that we're living in an age of an ala carte democracy where it's easier people feel more comfortable picking a single issue and going with that and I understand that because signing up to a political party, signing up to a platform where you might not agree with all elements but you can feel quite daunting but at the same time, you can't run elections as politics. You can't run a democracy just through these single issue organizations. Parties have an absolutely vital role in that. Michael mentioned in his introductory speech a polarization and I found it very interesting there was a concept of good polarization and extreme polarization and indeed good polarization ensures that politics doesn't get boring. It's important to have a robust discussion on a national stage, an international stage about a variety of issues. But of course, we've seen particularly in Europe the effects of more extreme polarization and that's where the concept of political dialogue comes in and a demo we work quite closely on that both internationally and in Finland and political party dialogue is not just restricted to within parliament, it's more, it's about the parties having an understanding of the shared space and having a common understanding of what issues are there to be discussed. So I'll keep my remarks at that. Just to highlight the critical role of parties in all of this. Thank you, Gary. Michael, please. Yeah, thank you, Ken. And thanks to all for the contributions. I'd like to connect to what Tanja was saying before and speak a little bit about how we may come up with initiatives to fill the longer electoral cycle but also how to tie together various stakeholders, EMBs, election management bodies, political parties, as just mentioned, the media and so forth. And to that purpose, I'd like to share the example of what we did in Austria over the last couple of years as a group of international election observers and experts who actually have come back home and discussed what can we do in our own country and what can we do inside the European Union to actually bring our expertise to bear. And so when we started this at home, so to speak, to be honest, in the beginning, there was not much interest because in a European democracy like Austria, 10 years ago, they thought, well, what do you want? But a few years later in 2016, we actually had a significant electoral crisis situation where the entire presidential election was canceled and the repeat round had to be repeated twice due to administrative inconsistencies and technical errors. And suddenly there was space to speak and we came back to the stakeholders. And in this course, we spoke to constitutional lawyers. We spoke to all parties represented in parliament. We spoke to the election management bodies at various level. And finally, of course, we met OSCE Odear as international observer organization visiting Austria every now and then. And established a discussion. So apart from working with first time voters in schools in Austria, voters allowed to vote from the age of 16. And apart from getting engaged academically as well, we developed activities with the parliament. And we actually initiated a discussion of electoral reforms and electoral reform issues together with the constitutional speakers of all political parties, which was held first three years ago and which caused more debates after an election. So the point here is that we actually, we built on our own recommendations. We built on the recommendations that were provided by OSCE Odear for Austria for a number of years. We summarized them. We presented them back to parliament, to the parties and OSCE Odear and the election management body were invited as well to keep the ball rolling and to continue this discussion. And we think this was very fruitful. The next governmental agreement actually had a chapter on electoral reforms in it. And as you currently see, electoral politics in Austria keep being quite dynamic. So we stay on the ball and we will actually have the next electoral reform discussion in the Austrian parliament next Friday, during which we will also present an academic study that we have engaged together with the University of Vienna where we conducted a study on poll workers. So we looked at a very concrete issue that is very tangible to the public and see how do poll workers relate to their service to performance? How could it potentially be improved? Building on the situation that the political parties who nominated the poll workers are actually running out of people potentially in the future. So we conducted a survey among 1000 poll workers, prepared it for an academic journal and the results of which will also be presented in the Austrian parliament next Friday. So these are just a few examples of what we try to do in Austria. We have also tried to bring our attention back to the European level with the election watch you election assessment of the 2019 European elections and we were also invited and are being invited continuously to present our findings as civil society to the European Commission and the European Parliament. I may speak more about that later but I want to give the floor to others. Thanks. Thanks Michael. Highlighting basically how to go about ensuring that there are reforms which is one of the main challenges that we've brought up a number of different times. It's also come up with the Q&A of how to ensure that there are reforms if there isn't a political will for those reforms to be enacted. And just as an afterword to this, sorry. Just as an afterword, just to say at discussion event on electoral reforms that is open to the public between civil society and parliamentarians in the Austrian parliament wouldn't have happened by itself. So it really needs initiative to get these things together. You need to contact the respective parties. You need to be in touch with the EMB and the authorities. You need to be in touch with all dear to actually incentivize return visits and keep up the momentum of discussions between international bodies and national bodies where this would not have happened under circumstances where other countries may have been of higher priorities. So by tying these links and being persistent in this course we actually believe that can be made a difference. Great, yeah, indeed, indeed. Domenico, I think you're next and then Tanya. Yes, I think when Michael just presented about the meeting about the Q&A selection watch respond a number of questions starting from Nina's interrogation. What happens with the recommendations provided by observers and how this is a much richer and complex process. That's where the form with Tanya was mentioned that somehow needs to be nurtured internally. The recommendation of observers can remain just on paper if they're not filtered to a process of ownership and national appropriation, I would call it. And this is just what a wonderful case that can be replicated, but also explains the complexity and the various elements that need to be there. The international presence with recommendation, a national civil society with enough expertise to connect the very stuff at the parliamentary level and with other institutions. Engage into a process. In a way, this is the sense of what NDPD is trying to provide and what you can also will master and channel very, very soon in our study that is coming up very soon. How this can be further spread on a global scale a lot depends on how observers' recommendations are then analyzed and discussed by national groups in the post-electoral piece. And a lot depends on what the recommendation tells us. I think our study will tell us a lot on what recommendations tell us about electoral processes. I believe that recommendation related to technical improvements don't probably concern more than 35, maybe 40% of what the recommendations are about. Much of the rest, maybe 50% if we include the judiciary into the spot. But what about the other 50%? I think the enabling environment, the equitable access to media, this information operations, abuse of state resources are what make up a lot of the demands. And these are not something that can be addressed with classical electoral assistance, but it has to be much more wide in scope and in time. So you've referenced the study that we've done. It also echoes, I think, Tanya, you said this from the Westminster Foundation study of the fact that civil society helps in terms of the implementation of certain recommendations. R1 very much does point to what you said, Domenico, that many of the recommendations are inherently political. And because they are inherently political, technical solutions are not going to work. And because those technical solutions are not going to work, there needs to be more of the type of stuff that Michael has just presented, that Nino's organization does in Georgia. That type of work, I think you mentioned in the questions as well, that constant observation or constant engagement that doesn't come just at the moment. But this has been said for a number of years. I think that the analysis underlines that this is very true, that people's kind of inclination or intuition is correct, that this is indeed a very massive challenge for ensuring that there is momentum for reforms afterwards. But I don't, Tanya, if you've got something else to add on this point or if it's another point, but please go ahead. Yeah, thanks, Ken. Yeah, just to reiterate, Dominico was just saying, yeah, it's true. I mean, we looked at it in a study to five African countries and basically collected 1,300 recommendations and logged them. And out of them, there were 40% of these recommendations not addressed to actors. So they were floating in the room and nobody was really addressing them in any way. And also what Dominico said, out of them, the 40%, one third of it was addressed technical to election commission. And they had a high level of implementation, like 43%, which is high. Parliament only had 30. And they have much more resources at their hands than the election commission would have. So there is a disparity in all of that. But one thing I wanted to mention is another thing we see at the end, also we saw in the research, when people get the recommendations, lots of them are, and I would like to use Dominico's term on the democracy gap level. They are very high recommendations. They're basically goals and end goals of things to look at, like change of the media law. But there's a long way towards that. And that is never anywhere mentioned. And it's very difficult for people to pick them up and to look at them. And we're trying right now to develop something which is looking from the macro to the micro approach and have smaller recommendations be developed specifically for areas where recommendations are not implemented like political participation of women and political party campaign finance because they hit on power structures. These are very often just left alone. And they need to be addressed in a smaller level and then have an incremental process within society, within the environment to actually come to the end goal. And this is not gonna happen in one electoral cycle. And that's another thing donors also need to understand. This is not happening very fast. This is a change in society, potentially behavioral change in society on some levels as well. And that needs to be fostered over much longer term. Thanks. Thank you, Tanya. I have the statistics actually here, from what you referenced. So 33% of EU electoral observation mission recommendations concern the electoral management body and 44 so more concern the political environment and political competition. So you can see that that is very often an area that is central area of focus because it is, as we've said, it's one of the great challenges. I think there's also questions in here about technologies, new technologies, the impact on elections. There are also some questions about reform, particularly in Africa, Malawi, Kenya that we have. Michael, you have your hand up again, please. Yeah, just really like to connect to what was just said again. And when Tanya was mentioning the smaller scale recommendations, the issues that, to pin the attention on where it really hurts. And I just want to say these issues, they don't stop outside the European Union. Like, although this study was conducted in an African examples, but similar issues may occur inside the European Union and at European level. So this is why we try to mobilize election observer expertise in Europe to, for the first time, observe European elections comprehensively for the first time, a civil society based in 2019. And plan to do that again in 2024. And what we found that there was great interest on the side of European decision makers to actually get this perspective, to get this civil society slash expert perspective on electoral processes. Holding stations may not necessarily be observed in this context. It may be relevant in some countries in the European Union and less so in others. But there are growing areas of regulation, growing areas of social dynamics that relate to electoral systems across the European Union that we need to address, including as was mentioned, social media regulation, including the pending issue of electoral participation of persons with disabilities, which is very ununiformly addressed across the European Union. And the list could continue. So we did this as an election assessment kind of report, but nevertheless being able of taking a deep dive and providing recommendations that also serve as material and baseline for further discussions in the European Parliament and other European stakeholders. And we will be very happy to continue these debates not only within EPP, but also with everybody else who's listening. Very good, thank you, Michael. I have Nino on disinformation and maybe who work in Georgia. We have five minutes left, a bit under five minutes. So Nino, please take the floor and then I'll turn to Domenico. Yeah, I just wanted not to leave the questions which are here mentioned in the chat that really disinformation and propaganda is kind of a threat to elections, but also it might be opportunity as well to use all these tools that question was from Armin. Georgia is on the fifth place in the world about inauthentic coordinated behavior and we have very high level of disinformation, propaganda and information manipulation which is related to elections mostly. And unfortunately it's not only for disinformation but we have homegrown. And what we do is just to share experience because it was asked these questions. One, we are kind of trying to debunk disinformation which is related to political parties. We also very closely cooperate with Facebook itself and when we have these fake accounts and coordinated behavior, we are trying to inform Facebook which is taking down on this disinformation and propaganda and also we have cases of having media literacy, trainings, workshop, working with media in order to like spread what is disinformation and in order to give to people information how bad it is, how it undermines democratic institutions. So we really think that the disinformation and propaganda is one of the threats which is coming more and more and it will be our future threat for elections and in general about democratic processes. I will not continue. I know that very short of time. So thank you. But thanks Nima. And highlighting sort of the double dual approach of trying to attack the supply and then trying to understand sort of demand or the citizen side of disinformation. I think John first and then Domenico. And if there's anybody else who'd like to take the floor, please, you have to speak up now. John, please. Yeah, very quickly because there was one question about youth and youth engagement. And I'm sorry that we are coming to that issue maybe when we have one minute left. So I think I would just ask or maybe request that now we have tried a global conversation about elections. I think that we could also try to have a similar on youth and democracy because I think that some of the topics that we are discussing is very much related to the challenge of getting youth engaged. But I think that there was also a need to discuss various strategies, opportunities and experiences from all over the globe on that topic. So that was what I wanted to say at the end. Very good. Very well noted. John, Domenico. Yes, very briefly. I'm thanking you for this opportunity. I think so much has been already said and so much made on the grill at the moment. You mentioned as well technology as an increasing challenge or a problem. Yeah, the way I will decline this is that technology improvements or in the new applications in the electoral process permeates basically now every single aspect of the electoral process. That's not single from voter registration from voter education to candidate registration now even to even observers applications all done for electoral technology for me. So what we are witnessing now as a challenge is also that an increased sophistication ability from national stakeholders to use technology means and less technical proficiency from assistance providers. That's also a challenge that we need to look at and I'll stop there because I'm short. Thank you all for this great discussion. Thanks very much Domenico and thanks to everybody who joined us. Lots of messages to take from this. I think it's an interesting practice also for us to have this engagement. I personally I prefer this to something that's a panel of 10 speakers with 10 minutes et cetera to get people engaged and replying to each other. But I just say, I think there's a few takeaways. One of those takeaways is that as a collective we do need to do a better job as those who are pro-democracy advocates as well as working on the issue of trying to use elections to reinforce democratic processes more widely. That can involve more participatory methods. It can involve better engagement of coalitions that push for change. But there are many different ways in order to do that. And there are ways that we, as a collective we need to think about. And there are also, and I think this is important there are also technical elements that can be improved that build on this so that they shouldn't be just technical on their own. They should marry that technical side with a more political. And that includes in terms of technologies it also includes areas of codes of conduct that were mentioned before better communication between different actors. So there's this whole scope of work and we will be continuing on that. For all of you who have joined please reiterate that there's the website globaldemocracycoalition.org where you can see some of the other events there's some really interesting ones over the course of the day. Don't try to join all of them that is physically and humanly impossible but please pick the ones that you're particularly interested in. And thank you very much to all of the speakers with us today and thank you very much to everyone that joined us. Thank you very much. Bye. Thank you, Ken. Bye bye. Thank you very much. Bye.