What happens before the ballot
In 2026, fifty countries vote in fifty-five national elections —presidential, legislative, parliamentary, referendums— spread across the five continents. Conventional coverage concentrates on the predictable: polls, candidates, results. Diálogo Ciudadano covers something else, the layer that decides much of the game before a single ballot box opens: the digital conditions under which the contest takes place.
That layer is hard to see because it does not appear in the vote count. It is in who can pay for advertising and whether that advertising is visible, in whether the environment is contaminated by surveillance or internet shutdowns, in what manipulation operations are documented and with what technique. To make it measurable, we have broken it into four trackers that connect to each other. This piece explains how they fit.
Four trackers, one layer
Each tracker answers a different question about the same election, and together they form a profile no isolated headline offers.
| Tracker | Question it answers | Gap it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral risk 2026 | What regime and digital environment is voting? | Formal democracy ↔ real conditions |
| Electoral digital integrity | Are there rules and transparency for advertising and disinformation? | Election ↔ digital safeguards |
| Political ad spending | How much political spend is traceable and how much escapes? | Visible spend ↔ real spend |
| Documented disinformation | What manipulation operations are detected, and with what technique? | Apparent discourse ↔ detected manipulation |
The electoral-risk tracker is the starting point: it cross-references each country’s political regime, per the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, with verified digital risks. Of its twenty-two elections profiled, only six take place in full democracies, and twelve have verified digital risk. It is the broadest portrait: where people are voting and on what ground.
From the macro to the concrete
The other three trackers descend from regime to mechanisms. The electoral-digital-integrity tracker measures whether each country regulates political advertising, whether that advertising is transparent in an ad library, and what framework applies against disinformation. Here the contrast is sharp: the EU countries voting in 2026 apply the world’s most demanding transparency regime, while in the United States transparency depends on the platforms’ voluntary libraries.
The political-ad-spending tracker sharpens it further, and reveals a paradox: when the EU banned political advertising to make it more transparent, the spending did not vanish —it became invisible, reclassified as non-political content—. In the United States, by contrast, $10.8 billion is projected in the most expensive midterm in its history. The figure visible in the libraries is always a floor, never a ceiling.
And the documented-disinformation tracker records the operations that organizations with method have detected: deepfakes in Hungary, coordinated networks in private messaging in Colombia and Brazil, generative AI in the United States. Its golden rule —detecting is not attributing— avoids turning a data point into an accusation.
Why four and not one
It might seem cleaner to merge the four dimensions into a single “digital democratic health” index. We do not, and the reason is methodological. The dimensions rarely point the same way. Hungary has the world’s best advertising-transparency framework —it is the EU— and, at the same time, Pegasus used against journalists and deepfakes in the campaign. The United States is a democracy with fully competitive elections and, at the same time, no federal transparency law and unregulated generative AI in the campaign.
A single number would hide those contradictions; four separate profiles expose them. That is the editorial bet: we prefer four honest, comparable data points to a comfortable index that averages what should not be averaged. Whoever wants the summary has it in the risk tracker; whoever wants the detail, in the other three.
Who it is for
This four-tracker architecture is designed as infrastructure, not as election-day coverage. An electoral observation mission, a platform’s integrity team, a political-risk insurer, a fact-checker or a researcher find here what daily coverage does not give: comparable, country-by-country conditions, with source and cutoff date, updated election after election, building a memory that the news noise does not keep. The four pieces feed off the same global calendar and connect by country, so an election’s risk can be read in four layers or in just one.
Methodology note
The four trackers share Diálogo Ciudadano’s 2026 global election calendar, verified against public sources and including all election types. Each attributes its assessments to its source —EIU and V-Dem for the regime, regulatory frameworks and ad libraries for integrity and spending, observatories and fact-checkers for disinformation— and distinguishes between detection and attribution. A country’s absence from a tracker means the absence of verifiable public data, not the absence of the phenomenon. None predicts results nor judges candidates. They are informational infrastructure, not advice.