About Us

The Pricing in Elections Database was developed by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) under the United States Agency for International Development’s Global Elections and Transitions Leader Award (USAID GEPT). It builds on budget categories and pricing procedures developed by IFES and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in their 2006 publication: Getting to the Core: A Global Survey on the Cost of Registration and Elections (CORE). The CORE indicators outlined in the earlier paper were adapted through iterative consultations with practitioners and scholars on election administration, operations, costs and inclusion.

The resulting database is an open, consolidated source of election budget and spending data for countries around the world, designed to support the needs of election administrators, technical assistance providers, donors, policymakers, scholars, and advocates for election reform. This flexible tool can be used for a wide range of purposes, to include:

Informing budget planning processes;
Conducting comparative research;
Identifying geographic and temporal trends in election spending; and
Costing out high- and low-tech options for improving electoral inclusion and integrity.

Data is uploaded to the website on a rolling basis. For information on data collection and categorization techniques, please visit the ‘About the Data’ page of the website.

To submit an inquiry about the Pricing in Elections project or to contribute data, please contact IFES at PricingInElections@ifes.org.