By Therese Pearce, Peter Wolf and Abdurashid Solijonov in IDEA International. Here is an excerpt:

At International IDEA, we track election-related data points for use in our knowledge products and publish them on our website for public use (see databases at www.idea.int). After years of advocating for open data in election administration, we realise that many electoral management bodies (EMBs) are still not entirely on-board.

Let us use the example of Voter Turnout data, which we have been tracking for almost 30 years, including this most recent overview of voter turnout in democracies in 2022. While updating voter turnout data for national elections held in 2022, we were unable to find national voter turnout data for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Papua New Guinea (PNG). In more than 20 countries, voter turnout data is unavailable from official sources or the EMB online.  

The most commonly occurring problems are:

• • EMBs don’t publish voter turnout data on their websites. Media representatives get the data from press conferences held by EMBs or printed materials.

Read the full story here.