The report’s methodology is deliberately comparative. Rather than treating each national contest as an isolated case, the authors analyze the full electoral cycle, from campaign finance and media conditions through polling day operations to the announcement of results, with a particular focus on three dimensions: inclusivity, transparency and trust. Across nine chapters and 20 case studies, the research team assembled evidence on mis- and disinformation, gender-based violence, natural hazards, cyber attacks, electoral management malfunctions and the influence of money in politics. This cross-national design allows the authors to identify patterns that would be invisible in single-country studies, and it underpins one of the report’s core arguments: because challenges such as campaign disinformation and political polarization are not confined to any single nation, efforts to improve elections should be global as well as local.

Mis- and disinformation emerged as the most widespread threat of the year. Narratives of this kind were recorded in at least 62 percent of the 39 national elections monitored, a figure that underscores how thoroughly false and misleading content has penetrated contemporary campaigns. The documented examples were diverse in both form and delivery. In Moldova, Ireland, Cote d’Ivoire and Australia, researchers recorded allegations of electoral fraud, misleading claims targeting individual candidates, AI-generated deepfakes, cyber-enabled disinformation and misleading political content circulating on platforms such as WeChat and RedNote. The technical sophistication of some of these interventions, particularly the use of synthetic media, marks a qualitative shift from earlier cycles of rumor and smear, since AI-generated audio and video can now be produced cheaply and at scale, making it harder for voters and fact-checkers alike to distinguish authentic material from fabrication.

A second, closely related finding concerns gender-based violence in electoral contexts. The report recorded instances in at least 22 of the countries monitored, many of them committed, enabled or amplified through digital technologies. Women candidates and election officials in countries including Ecuador, Chile and Germany were targeted with misogynistic, racist and sexualized online attacks, ranging from coordinated harassment campaigns and explicit threats to manipulated images and sexualized AI-generated content. Researchers have long noted that such abuse functions as a form of political violence: it raises the personal cost of standing for office or administering elections, discourages women’s participation and can distort the candidate pool and public debate. The 2025 data suggest that digital platforms have become a primary vector for this abuse, allowing perpetrators to reach targets directly and to amplify attacks rapidly across networks.

Extreme weather added a third layer of pressure. Floods, heatwaves, tropical storms and other natural hazards affected 12 national and local elections in 11 countries monitored during the year, with elections in Ecuador, the Philippines, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines among those disrupted. The operational implications are considerable: severe weather can damage polling infrastructure, displace voters, impede the delivery of ballot materials and endanger the safety of election workers and observers. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of such events, electoral management bodies are being forced to incorporate disaster preparedness into contingency planning, a domain that historically sat outside the core competencies of election administration. The report treats this as a growing structural risk to the continuity and credibility of democratic processes rather than a series of isolated incidents.

Campaign finance constituted a fourth persistent vulnerability. The report highlights ongoing irregularities involving campaign spending, weak oversight and uneven enforcement of existing laws, alongside interference by corporate and foreign interests. Data from the Electoral Integrity Project indicate that electoral campaigns have continued to be the poorest-performing stage of the electoral cycle, a finding with significant implications, since the campaign period is when parties and candidates compete most intensively for influence over voters. Australia, Albania and Romania are cited as notable examples where these pressures were visible in 2025. The report also points to broader strains on media integrity and campaign finance regulation, as declining press freedom and increasingly digital financial flows, including online advertising and platform-based spending, create regulatory blind spots that national oversight bodies struggle to monitor effectively.

Despite this formidable list of threats, the report’s overall assessment is not one of democratic collapse. Election quality, it finds, remained broadly stable across the countries studied. Equally important, the authors document how electoral management bodies and their partners are actively testing new responses, from changes to voting arrangements and the deployment of digital tools to regulatory reforms, risk-management measures and new forms of cooperation with civil society, technology companies and international organizations. Erik Asplund, Senior Advisor at International IDEA, emphasized the scale of the task facing administrators, noting that election authorities are being asked to manage increasingly complex risks, from disinformation and violence to natural hazards and operational disruption, and that anticipating these risks, strengthening institutional capacity and working with partners are essential to protecting elections and public trust.

The report is candid that not every initiative produced the intended results, and this honesty is part of its analytical value. By examining 20 case studies in detail, the authors are able to distinguish between reforms that strengthened resilience and those that fell short, offering practical lessons on how electoral management can evolve in response to changing political, technological and environmental conditions. Holly-Ann Garnet of the Royal Military College of Canada, a co-author of the report, framed the challenge in terms of innovation: new challenges to electoral integrity require innovative solutions, and the report highlights both the important steps being taken around the world to strengthen the quality of elections and the issues that will require attention moving forward. This orientation toward learning, rather than simply cataloguing failure, reflects the report’s underlying premise that comparative evidence can accelerate institutional improvement.

The 2025 review also builds directly on International IDEA’s earlier assessment of the 2024 election Super-Cycle, when more than 70 national-level elections focused global attention on the role of elections in shaping and maintaining democracy. Taken together, the two reports sketch a continuum: 2024 demonstrated the sheer scale of simultaneous democratic activity, while 2025 reveals the persistent, adaptive nature of the threats that accompany it. As Professor James observed, all countries, large or small, are facing challenges in ensuring that elections truly empower people, and the value of drawing lessons across borders is correspondingly high. For policymakers, election administrators and civil society organizations, the report’s message is that electoral integrity is no longer threatened by any single vector but by the interaction of information manipulation, political violence, financial influence and environmental disruption, and that defending it will require equally integrated, internationally coordinated responses.

Subject of Research: Global pressures on electoral integrity, including disinformation, gender-based violence, natural hazards and campaign finance, during national elections held in 2025

Article Title: Electoral integrity under pressure as elections faced persistent threats in 2025

Article References: Electoral integrity under pressure as elections faced persistent threats in 2025. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: electoral integrity, disinformation, deepfakes, gender-based violence, campaign finance, natural hazards, election administration, International IDEA, Electoral Integrity Project, democracy, press freedom, cyber attacks

The report, authored by Brookings senior fellow Elena Patel, examined the implications of the new rule in detail. Its central conclusion is stark: the policy could lead to many thousands of ballots arriving at election offices after their deadlines, and late ballots are, in most jurisdictions, rejected. Patel’s analysis estimates that the change could produce between 43,000 and 55,000 additional ballot rejections nationwide. Set against the roughly 158 million voters who participate in recent national elections, that figure is small as a share of the electorate. But the distribution of those rejected ballots matters enormously, because many races around the country are extremely close, and a few votes either way might make all the difference in a contested district or state.

According to the analysis, the effects of the policy change will likely be most pronounced in rural areas of the western United States. These are regions where Post Office service is most likely to become less frequent under the new rule, and where many states automatically send mail ballots to all registered voters, meaning that the population most dependent on reliable mail service is also the population most exposed to the change. The overlap between rural postal routes, once-daily transportation, and universal mail-ballot states creates a concentrated zone of risk that the national averages obscure.

The policy at the center of the analysis is known as Regional Transportation Optimization, or RTO, which the Postal Service began rolling out last year as part of an effort to run its transportation network more efficiently. RTO applies to post offices that are located more than 50 miles from the plant that processes their mail. The change is a response to a long and steep decline in letter volume: the amount of single-piece first-class mail has fallen precipitously in recent decades, from 57 billion pieces in 1997 to 12 billion in 2023. Faced with a shrinking core business, the agency has been restructuring its network, and RTO is one of the most consequential pieces of that restructuring for the communities it touches.

The mechanics of the change are straightforward but far-reaching in their effects. In the past, each Post Office had two pickups a day: one to drop off mail in the morning, and a second later in the day to pick up additional mail. Under the new RTO policy, post offices more than 50 miles from their regional plant now have only one combined pickup and drop-off per day. Carriers still collect mail from homes and businesses according to the same schedule as before, but in many rural post offices, the mail those carriers gather is now taken to the regional sorting center only once a day rather than twice. The practical consequence is that for any mail posted, or picked up by mail carriers, later in the day, RTO adds an extra day to the total delivery time. In an election context, where ballots must physically arrive by a statutory deadline, an extra day of transit can be the difference between a counted vote and a discarded one.

It is important to note that this policy change is separate from recent and ongoing Trump administration efforts to restrict voting and mail-in voting, which have been the subject of lengthy legal battles. Although the Supreme Court recently declined to intervene in a federal injunction barring the Postal Service from carrying out the administration’s mail-voting provisions, the administration has signaled that it will continue to pursue that effort. The RTO policy, by contrast, originated as an efficiency measure within the Postal Service’s own network planning, driven by economics rather than election administration. Its electoral consequences, however, may prove just as significant as any deliberate voting restriction, which is precisely why election analysts are paying close attention.

The scale of exposure is considerable. Roughly 121 million of the country’s 253 million voting-age adults in the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C. live nearest to a post office that will now have once-a-day pickup. Taken together, these post offices serve around 47 percent of all voting-age adults—nearly half the country. While not every one of those adults votes by mail, and not every mailed ballot is at risk of arriving late, the sheer breadth of the affected population means that even a small increase in rejection rates translates into tens of thousands of discarded ballots.

To estimate the effects of the rule change, Patel focused on three states: California, North Carolina, and Washington. These states each held primary elections earlier this year, and each reports how many mail ballots voters in each county returned, how many were rejected, and why, with late arrival recorded as a separate category. All three also report the same level of detail for the 2022 and 2024 primaries, both of which were held before RTO was implemented. That allowed Patel to compare 2026 rejection rates directly with previous years. In addition, because RTO does not affect all counties evenly, she was able to compare counties that are more and less exposed to the change, isolating the effect of the policy from other factors that might influence rejection rates.

The results of that comparison are unambiguous. In these three states, RTO doubled the rate of rejection for mail-in ballots. The overall rate of mail-in ballots rejected in California and Washington was around one percent, while in North Carolina the rejection rate was several times higher. Extrapolating from these state-level findings to the national picture is difficult, but the underlying volume of mail voting makes the stakes clear: nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in the 2024 general election, a total of around 48 million votes. Around forty percent of mail-in ballots in recent elections came from places covered by RTO, meaning that a large fraction of the country’s mail ballots now moves through a transportation network with materially less daily capacity than it had during the last presidential election.

Patel offers several recommendations for reducing the risk that the RTO policy leads to increased ballot rejections. The most immediate one belongs to voters themselves: do not wait until the last minute to send in mail ballots. By mailing earlier, voters can ensure their ballots arrive well before the deadline, building in a buffer against the extra day of transit that RTO can impose. This is especially crucial now because the Postal Service has declared that a postmark may no longer reliably show the day a piece of mail was sent, undermining the traditional signal voters and election officials have used to judge timeliness. Moreover, the Supreme Court has ruled that the postmark can be used as proof that a voter met the deadline for in-time voting, and several states have ended the grace periods that once cushioned late-arriving ballots, removing another layer of protection for ballots that arrive just after election day.

Beyond individual behavior, Patel recommends that states and counties widely publicize the change to the voters affected by RTO, so that those voters know to adjust when they mail their ballots. She further recommends that the Postal Service make it clear to voters exactly which post offices are now operating under the one-pickup RTO rules, which would help people understand the constraints they are working under when they decide how and when to return a ballot. Whether those recommendations are adopted in time for November remains an open question, but the analysis makes clear that the window for action is narrow. A scheduling change designed to trim costs from a transportation network serving a declining mail volume has, in effect, become an election administration issue of national consequence, and the tens of thousands of ballots it could reject will not be evenly spread—they will land hardest in the rural western communities where mail service was already thinnest and where entire electorates vote by post.

Subject of Research: Impact of the USPS Regional Transportation Optimization policy on mail-in ballot rejection rates in U.S. elections

Article Title: New post office policy could lead to the rejection of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in November

Article References: New post office policy could lead to the rejection of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in November. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: USPS, mail-in voting, Regional Transportation Optimization, Brookings Institution, ballot rejection, rural post offices, election administration, Elena Patel, postal policy, voting rights, mail ballots, 2026 election