 Hello, and welcome to International Ideas Session on Budgeting and Financing of Elections. My name is Erik Asplund, Program Officer, and with me today I have Therese Pierce-Lanella, the head of Electroprocessors Unit. Welcome, Therese. Thank you. Therese, how can one measure the integrity or quality of elections? At its very, very simplest, it is the trust of the people and the political actors, and this trust is manifested in the form of accepted results and an orderly transition of power, following a well-run election. That would be approximately how you would measure quality. Of course, in that picture, the verdict of expert witnesses plays in, and that might be the media that people listen to, journalists, and so forth. It could be observer groups or senior diplomats, for example, who weigh in. It could be things that are said on social media that play into how people perceive those elections or perhaps specialized academics. So there are people whose specialist knowledge weighs into that. Unfortunately, the clean links between a well-run election and an accepted results, it's not always so simple or so straightforward. That can be thwarted by misunderstandings about what's happened or how those or rumors or something that's a mistake that's happened, how it plays out, or how it's understood. And there are also maybe people in whose interest it is to discredit the elections. So sometimes the link between well-run elections and accepted elections is not so straightforward. Thank you. Now, why is trust so important for an electoral management body? Yeah, I mentioned the word trust because somehow that is the fundament. The one outcome that you want when organizing an election is an accepted result. And accepted has two parts. One part is a correct result, an accurate result that reflects the will of the people as expressed in the ballot boxes. But it also means a trusted result so that these political stakeholders, the political actors, and the voters accept that that result is the correct one. And so trust is somehow, it's essential. It is foundational to running elections. But it also makes elections much more easy to run because all transactions are made more easy when there is trust between different people, different parties, and so forth. Now how does an election management body gain the trust of the people? Yeah, there's a number of ways and there's no simple strategy. But the most basic one is, of course, delivery over time. So an election management body who consistently delivers elections that people see as well run will be more trusted to do so in the future. But it also has to do with behaviors. When people meet with an authority, they expect to see respect, some kind of procedural justice that they expect to see fairness in the way that they're treated. And so the way that election management body staff behave in the frontlines during registration, during candidate registration, that has a big impact on people's trust in addition to delivery. Finally, another aspect that's important to take into consideration is pathways of redress, I guess we might say, is that if something goes wrong or if some person feels that the process has been unfair, that there need to be pathways to take care of that distress. So pathways of certainty are helpful to building trust as well. On that note, is trust expensive, do you think? Funnily enough, and this is well known in the business community, it is in fact distrust that is expensive. When you do not have distrust, when you do not have trust in society, when you have distrust in society, it makes transactions more expensive because you have to have a third party guarantee for anything that happens. It makes transactions more, more complicated. Distrust of a process that is not trusted requires many additional security mechanisms, perhaps very, very high quality ballot papers that are, that can be very expensive to procure. It could be armored cars and so forth to transport ballot papers. So in high trust societies, some of those things are not needed in the same way as they are in low trust election environments. Thank you Therese. Now many electoral management bodies are legitimately under resourced. What advice would you be able to give an election management body to obtain more funds or to better use the resources that they already have? This is hard and this is something we're in discussion with in a number of our regional offices right now with many stakeholders and interestingly, this is in all types of countries. Even the most well-developed democracies have an extraordinary pressure on public agencies to cut costs at a regular basis and they have difficulty justifying their budgets each time they put them forward, but this is a particularly difficult issue for countries that are transitioning from a high level of electoral assistance to running their elections with government funding. So this is an issue that faces many and it's a hard one, but one thing that we're learning is that step one is a conversation. If we think about societies, if we think about elections as a societal endeavor rather than as an event, then the conversation is a societal conversation about the type of electoral democracy that we want to see. Who do we want to be involved in that electoral democracy? What does representation look like in our country? Who is represented and how do we bring in the most marginalized? Now that kind of a conversation can lead to a reframing of the idea of cost of elections to being in fact an investment in an electoral democracy or an investment in the society that we would like to see. There are of course some kind of tried and true tips for keeping costs reasonable and that is in general taking advantage of the normal means of transportation, communication, recruitment that are normally used so that is not importing something that is different in particular for an election because that drives costs up so using the normal means of communication. And also another possible tip is interagency coordination that is because elections only happen on an irregular basis so taking advantage of resources that exist within other agencies. It could be whether it's taking advantage of teachers and schools or whether it's taking advantage of an authority who has a fleet of cars. So this kind of interagency cooperation can be helpful to spread the burden. If we take the example of cyber security right now that's an area in which interagency cooperation helps spread both knowledge risks and also costs. Thank you very much Therese and thank you very much for watching. Thank you so much. Really a more interesting topic than we might imagine. Thank you.