Safeguarding Elections in the Digital Age: Assessing Evolving Electoral Risks and Their Mitigation for Online Electoral Integrity

Jacobs, Schwertheim, Döring, and Rolfe’s policy brief provides a systematic assessment of the gap between electoral threat and electoral protection. The analysis maps the evolving threat landscape — AI-generated content, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, platform-level opacity, and the increasing speed of disinformation cycles during campaign periods — against the mitigations that governments, platforms, and civil society have deployed. The honest finding is that mitigation has not kept pace with threat evolution, and the data access constraints that limit independent research are themselves part of the problem.

The brief’s most valuable contribution is its insistence on multi-stakeholder coordination as a structural requirement, not an aspiration. No single actor — electoral commission, platform, civil society monitor, or security agency — has the visibility or the leverage to safeguard elections alone. For practitioners working on electoral integrity programmes, this provides both the threat framework and the coordination rationale needed to justify integrated approaches to election protection.