Comparison of the Best International Practices for Ensuring the Legitimacy of Elections to Election Commissions

The work contains 30 practices of formation and work of election commissions in different countries, which includes studies of legislation, reports and reports of various international organizations, news materials, existing academic literature on the given issues, as well as describes the structure and functions of different types of electoral bodies in different countries. Thanks to the study conducted in this work, a significant contribution was made to the understanding of electoral management. The auxiliary tool of the work is in-depth expert interviews, as well as the use of short reports by many specialists with extensive experience in the field of democratization and elections. The constructed regression models explain the institutional structure of the work of election commissions and demonstrate their dependence on such factors as the purity and potential of the election commission. The paper explains to what extent the formation of electoral commissions influences the legitimacy of elections, on the basis of which recommendations are made for further improvement of Russian electoral standards, the supremacy of democratic principles and the realization of political rights and freedoms of citizens.