Different Approaches to Counting Elections
Just how many elections are there in 2024? That's harder to count than one might expect. This is a primer on how different organizations approach it.
Written by Ana Khizanishvili
By now, we all heard that 2024 is going to be by far the biggest election year we’ve had in modern history, but what is it that makes 2024 so big and special, and exactly how many elections are we going to witness next year?
Like us, you might have seen different numbers floating around, and even our data has changed several times within this year, so we decided to put together a workshop to determine what are the variables that go into counting elections and what considerations organizations make to determine their number for a given year.
Before delving into the data and different approaches, here are a few resources that provide reliable and up-to-date information on elections:
Election Guide by the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES)
Election Cycle Tracker by Anchor Change and Supplemental Dashboard by Integrity Institute
25 Elections to Watch in 2024 by the International Republican Institute
Organizations take different approaches for counting elections in turn due to their priorities and perspectives towards democratic and election processes as well as organizational resources. Besides the different approaches, the types of elections counted are also one of the general aspects that can affect the data, whether the organization counts only national elections, includes or doesn’t include international ones, or local and municipal elections, and referenda will all have an effect on the overall number. Predicting runoffs and snap elections based on the organization’s resources and available data is another aspect to remember. Counting elections also raises the debate about what to do with elections that aren’t necessarily considered free or fair, such as Iran, Russia, North Korea and others.
Keeping all of this in mind, we have determined that there are three major approaches for counting global elections that are most common:
Institutions’ Approach - Counts elections based on the number of institutional outcomes that occur as a result of the election.
Example: elections in the United States in 2024 will be held on the same day, but it will elect the president, members of the Senate, and the House. Organizations with an “Institution’s approach” will count these as three elections.
Close to the “institutions’ approach” is the “Election Type” approach, which counts elections based on the branches of the government elected on the election day.
Example: following the same example, the “election type” approach would count the U.S. 2024 elections as two, presidential and legislative.
Another approach for counting elections is based on election dates. The “Dates” approach identifies the number of elections based on the election date. Determining the exact number with this approach is challenging as, in an early stage of the count, countries might not have identified dates, making it harder to know if the two scheduled elections will take place on the same day or not. Therefore, in the early stages of the count, in order to determine the number, organizations with this approach might make an assumption that all “double” elections will take place on the same day and consequently be counted as one.
Example: in the same example, the “dates” based approach will consider US elections as one as all the elections occur on the same day.
Here are some of the numbers for 2024 published by different organizations using these approaches:
IFES uses the Institution’s approach and is anticipating 99 elections
Anchor Change mainly uses the dates approach and counts the most significant national (presidential and legislative) and international (EU Parliament) elections. With this approach, we anticipate 88 elections in 82 countries. In contrast, when using Election Type approach, our data adds up to 109 elections in 82 countries
NDI’s elections tracker provides detailed information on elections across over 60 countries for 2024
The Economist anticipates elections in 76 countries - While the data is missing several countries from the numbers provided by Anchor Change, it also includes countries like Turkey and Brazil that will only hold local or municipal elections.
As you can see, these approaches can yield different results, which means that we will continue to see different numbers around the 2024 elections, but one thing is true: no matter what approach you take, more than half of the world's population over four billion people will be affected by the results of the elections in 2024.