Electoral assistance programmes/projects target one or more areas within the electoral cycle, ranging from legal reform, electoral administration, planning and operations, voters' registration, political parties, training of election officials and voters education, domestic observation and media monitoring, polling activities, counting and results tabulation, electoral dispute resolution developing into post- and inter-election activities. It is important to keep in mind that electoral assistance should take stock of all the steps of the electoral cycle and that inter-election periods are as crucial as the build up to the elections themselves.

Together, development agencies and partner counties should plan and implement electoral assistance within a framework of democratic governance by thinking ahead 5 to 10 years, rather than reacting to each electoral event as it occurs. In order to achieve this, it is crucial to acknowledge at both the political and operational levels that every time a decision to support an electoral process is made, such a decision entails involvement and commitment to the democratic evolution of the concerned country far beyond the immediate event to be supported. Any decision to keep offering ad hoc electoral support, while this might still be acceptable at the contingent political level, must be accompanied by the consideration that it will not solve the democracy gap in any partner country, but will instead trigger a more staggered process of development cooperation. Indeed, the core mistake of past electoral assistance projects did not rest in the provision of ad hoc short term support, but in the belief that such support would suffice to ensure the sustainability of the following electoral processes, the independence and transparency of the EMB concerned and the consequent democratic development of the partner country.

These considerations, together with the recognition that obstacles to the implementation of long-term assistance remained, led International IDEA and the EC to the development of a visual planning and training tool that could help development agencies, electoral assistance providers and electoral officials in partner countries to understand the cyclical nature of the various challenges faced in electoral processes: this tool has become known as the electoral cycle approach.

Elections are composed of a number of integrated building blocks, with different stakeholders interacting and influencing each other. Electoral components and stakeholders do not stand alone. They are interdependent, and therefore the breakdown of one aspect (for example the collapse of a particular system of voter registration) can negatively impact on every other, including human and financial resources, the availability of supplies, costs, transport, training and security, and thus on the credibility of the election itself. In turn, if an electoral process suffers from low credibility, this is likely to damage the democratisation process of the partner country and block its overall development objectives.