Politically biased or fake observation involves election monitoring by groups and individuals who lack independent credibility and methodology. These missions often align with non-democratic regimes and issue favorable reports, even when elections have evident irregularities. They aim to legitimize flawed elections and undermine electoral institutions and democratic elections. Fake observers’ missions seek to neutralize criticism from credible organizations like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe / Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) and independent domestic election observers, predominantly by propaganda in the host country.

Unlike legitimate observers, these groups offer little transparency and ignore international standards and election observation methodologies. Per EPDE’s experience, fake observers focus on creating a false sense of legitimacy for non-democratic regimes, undermining efforts to ensure fair and democratic elections.

EPDE defines fake observers as individuals who participate in election observation as accredited or non-accredited observers or ‘experts’ meeting any of the following criteria:

1. They fail to denounce the elections as short of meeting democratic standards despite ODIHR/OSCE PA monitoring missions or independent domestic election observers deeming them such.
2. They make statements or comments that lend legitimacy to the elections, contradicting the assessments of the aforementioned observation reports.
3. They are likely to have political, economic, or other conflicts of interest that would interfere with conducting observations impartially.
4. Their activities are restricted to short-term or isolated observations without clear and public acknowledgment of the limited scope of their work or conclusions. They fail to issue public reports on their findings and do not inform publicly about their methodology
5. They are likely to have travel and/or accommodation costs paid by governments, domestic politicians, or other domestic political actors or by individuals or organizations related to those individuals.

AND

Their presence can be confirmed by a picture or statement from a media outlet.

 

Our research on fake observers focuses primarily on OSCE region elections.

Our methodology is based on OSINT (open-source intelligence), which means the data used for the research is publicly accessible and open-source.

Due to the detailed nature of local authoritarian propaganda, EPDE accepts Russian, Belarusian, and Azerbaijani state media as reliable sources solely for confirming the presence of fake observers.

If the research team identifies doubts about an individual’s statement or presence, they will be contacted to provide a counterstatement, which will be published alongside their quote.

If such an individual presents substantial evidence of misquotation or false representation by the media and provides a counterstatement addressing such misquotation or misrepresentation, their profile will be removed from the database.