Department of Political Science and the Jackson Institute: “”A Dynamic Approach to Evaluating and Addressing Threats to Electoral Integrity: Spotlight on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia and Myanmar”

Event time: 
Thursday, January 29, 2015 - 12:00pm
Event description: 

Department of Political Science and the Jackson Institute present:

Chad Vickery, Director, Center for Applied Research and Learning, IFES & Staffan Darnolf, Director of Program Development and Innovation, IFES: “A Dynamic Approach to Evaluating and Addressing Threats to Electoral Integrity: Spotlight on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia and Myanmar.”

Summary: During this event, IFES will briefly present its innovative Electoral Integrity Assessment Methodology, a tool designed to rigorously assess specific vulnerabilities to electoral fraud, malpractice, and systemic manipulation and to present and prioritize recommendations for reform. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia and Myanmar will be used as case studies that exemplify different vulnerability patterns. The IFES team welcomes the group’s comments, critiques, and suggestions for more accurate or interesting ways to illustrate our findings.

Chad Vickery has 17 years of legal and international election administration experience with an emphasis on strengthening democracy and governance in transitioning societies. He has extensive experience in designing and managing election complaint adjudication programs; providing comparative legal analysis; working on elections; and rule of law programs throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia, Eurasia and the Middle East.

Vickery’s specific programmatic experience includes leading projects to ensure development of impartial legal frameworks for elections, increasing professionalism of election management bodies, establishing effective election dispute programs and increasing political participation of women and historically disenfranchised groups into the electoral process.

Vickery has also spearheaded the development of new methodologies for assessing the integrity of elections in countries around the world, with a focus on electoral fraud and malpractice and the investigation and adjudication of electoral complaints. He is a member of the Advisory Board to the Electoral Integrity Project, based at the University of Sydney and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He holds a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown University; a Juris Doctorate from the Catholic University of America with a concentration in comparative and international law; and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Washington. He is a member of the Washington State Bar and has been Appointed to the American Bar Association’s Advisory Committee to the Standing Committee on Election Law.

Staffan Darnolf, IFES Director of Program Development and Innovation, has 20 years of experience as a scholar and practitioner in the field of democratization and electoral processes. He specializes in electoral reform in emerging democracies and post-conflict societies and has published books, articles and chapters in peer-reviewed scholarly journals throughout his career.

Darnolf has been engaged as an elections expert in over 20 countries. Most recently, he served as IFES senior global electoral adviser and led IFES’ office in Zimbabwe, where he served as a senior adviser on electoral issues concerning the drafting of the new constitution, the constitutional referendum and electoral management processes.

Prior to his work in Zimbabwe, Darnolf served as IFES’ senior elections expert and country director in Moldova, Pakistan, Cambodia and Nepal (2005-2010). From 2003 to 2005, Darnolf was integrally involved in the transitional elections in Afghanistan where he was appointed an international election commissioner by the United Nations for the 2005 parliamentary elections. Between 1992 and 2003, Darnolf combined his scholarly career with regular assignments for the UN, European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, IFES and the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) in western, eastern and southern Africa, eastern Europe and southeast Asia.

Darnolf holds a Ph.D. in political science with a focus on elections in emerging democracies from Goteborg University in Sweden and a bachelor’s degree in public administration from the same university. He was also a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1998.

Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public