August 07, 2020

Georgia

Evaluation and recommendations on electoral reform ahead of parliamentary elections

Ahead of 2020 parliamentary elections election reform was one of the important issues discussed in parallel with the change of electoral system. The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) was actively involved in the working group on election reform and presented its joint recommendations with TI-Georgia. As a result of almost one-year long process there were some positive amendments adopted in the election code and other legal acts, but we think some crucial issues related with the composition of election administration, dispute resolution and campaigning via social networks have not been addressed and could be problematic also for upcoming parliamentary elections. The Report contains detailed analysis about the most important recommendations discussed in the working group, adopted amendments and remaining challenges. It has also two annexes: 1. Implementation of OSCED/ODIHR recommendations; 2. Implementation of ISFED-TI recommendations (which can be found below).

Election administration plays one of the leading roles in organizing and conducting elections. Budget spent on the remuneration of commission members and employees is always an issue of interest for the society especially ahead of elections. In 2016 ahead of parliamentary elections ISFED issued Report on Monitoring of CEC Salary Expenditures covering 2011-2015. At that time ISFED elaborated a number of recommendations to improve the existing practices. In 2020 we again decided to prepare Report of Monitoring Remuneration of the Election Administration covering the period of 2016-2019 in order to provide citizens with the information about budget spent on EMB remuneration and also to see if previous problems were addressed. The monitoring was extended also to district election commissions. As identified there are still some problems that need to be addressed, for instance, percentage and frequency of increasing official salary should be specified, both for CEC members and employees; during the election period a supplementary pay should not be provided in addition to a double official salary; frequency of a supplementary pay should be determined; etc.

The present document summarizes recommendations presented by ISFED and Transparency International - Georgia on the most important issues of the election reform and amendments introduced in the legislation.