Review of the 2024 Super-Cycle Year of Elections: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities

In 2024, a record-breaking 1.6 billion people across 74 national elections in 62 countries cast ballots in the space of a single calendar year. This was the result of a convergence of electoral cycles in different countries, leading to the description of 2024 as a ‘super-cycle’ election year. The number of elections taking place all over the world, organized under different conditions in varying contexts, highlighted the challenges that election stakeholders need to navigate to deliver on their mandates. This report, the first of its kind, sets out to identify and discuss electoral integrity challenges to global elections that emerged during the 2024 super-cycle year, drawing on the work of international IDEA and the Electoral Integrity Project.

This global report seeks to provide a cross-country analysis while taking a multidisciplinary approach to identifying lessons learned from the 2024 election year and to make those lessons accessible not only to specialists, such as academics, journalists and election practitioners, but also to a broad public that is interested in elections as a fundamental pillar of democracy. The report is the result of close collaboration between peers and has grown out of numerous and varied discussions, analyses and interpretations, providing both a summary of trends observed over the course of 2024 and reflections upon which good practice and policy can be based.