Course Learning Objectives

By the end of the semester, students who participate actively in this course and complete all readings and assignments should:

Understand the broad range of issues related to the conduct of elections and implications of failures of election integrity for democratization, democracy, and reversals and setbacks thereof.
Know key concepts, debates, types of information, and further study necessary to develop further expertise on one or more issues related to election integrity (e.g., legal frameworks, international organizations and cooperation, programming, statistics, engineering, project management, etc.)
Understand the complexity and context-specific nature of the origins, development, and practice of US and international norms of election integrity.
Identify explicit and implicit hypotheses embedded in social scientific, historical, and policy evidence and argument on the subject of electoral integrity.
Strengthen skills in assessing assertions, arguments, and evidence in social scientific, policy, and popular literatures and contributing to the debate by analyzing trade-offs involved in implementing policies and procedures designed to improve the quality of elections.
Develop a sense of scholarly community and collaboration with your fellow students, graduate and undergraduate.
Develop a sense of best practices and policies that can achieve electoral integrity while minimizing the costs of electoral reform.
Understand the preparation, skills, knowledge required to work on some aspect of election integrity in the field of international electoral assistance, including earning a certificate in one area of EU-UNDP electoral assistance e-learning.
Possess expertise in on the history and electoral administration of one US county and one foreign country, and be able to identify strengths and weaknesses of each.
Write four memoranda, the combination of and editing of which, based on instructor comments, can be used as a future writing sample. If you would like to develop the memos as a writing sample, keep in touch and I will be happy to help you develop it