About the database
The Electoral Recommendations Database (https://expertforum.ro/recomandari-electorale) contains recommendations or commitments regarding the electoral process and political financing, based on evaluations made by national or international organizations and institutions, which take into account agreements or other international documents to which Romania has adhered or ratified. The recommendations were made by Expert Forum, FiecareVot (a national coalition that monitors the elections in Romania and of which EFOR is a member), the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE / ODIHR) or the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO). The database also includes commitments from the Action Plans of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the National Anti-Corruption Strategy (SNA), respectively. Along the way, other relevant recommendations will be added. Most of the recommendations are made between 2016-2022, but it also includes those formulated by GRECO in 2010 and evaluated in several compliance reports, while ODIHR recommendations go back to 2009.
The database contains on 2 May 2022 a number of 475 electoral recommendations.
See statistics regarding the implementation of the recommendations
Methodology
The recommendations are divided into categories, which related to the stages of the electoral process. In some cases, a secondary category was added to better illustrate the multiple perspectives of a recommendation.
A recommendation can have one of the following statuses:
● Implemented – recommendation has been fully implemented
● Not implemented – recommendation not implemented at all
● No longer valid – this is a temporary regulation, which can no longer be evaluated
● Cannot be evaluated – there is not enough data or has been implemented recently and there was no time for a new evaluation. This category also includes recommendations related to elections that have not been held in the meantime and are specific to that type of election (e.g. elections for the European Parliament)
● Partially – only part of the recommendation has been implemented. In some cases there is draft legislation in the approval circuit to address the issue.
If a recommendation was made for a specific law or a type of election, the evaluation takes into account their specificity and does not refer to other ones. For example, the introduction of two rounds for the local elections will only refer to the law on local elections. In this case, the evaluation reflects the current status of the law.
However, there are some general recommendations, which refer to all types of processes such as “Streamlining the voting procedure and rethinking the manner in which voting materials are produced”; in this case, the evaluation refers to the most recent elections, which are the parliamentary elections, held in December 2020. If legislative amendments have been made in such cases, they are updated to May 2022. The majority of recommendations on political finance are general and refer to most elections.
Recommendations have been divided into legislative and practical. In case of some practical recommendations the assessment is not available as they have been made in 2020, but they will be evaluated for the next elections, if they will be relevant.
The status of international recommendations combines EFOR’s own evaluation and the status given by the organization, if available; see for example the case of ODIHR’s database https://paragraph25.odihr.pl.
The latest update was made in May 2022. The database includes all types of elections and referenda.
The functions of the database
Contact: septimius.parvu@expertforum.ro.