The UK has historically been held up as leading democracy with free and fair elections. However, our new report shows election quality in the UK is now ranked in the bottom half of countries in Europe.
The Global Electoral Integrity Report provides scores for election quality around the world. It defines electoral integrity as the extent to which elections empower citizens.
Iceland received the highest score for an election that took place in 2024, the “year of elections” during which 1.6 billion people went to the polls, according to Time Magazine. This was an unprecedented concentration of democratic activity in a single year. Iceland has a successful system of automatic voter registration and an electoral system that is judged to be fair to smaller parties.
