Countries With the Lowest Free and Fair Elections

Every country with a figure for free and fair elections, ranked from lowest to highest. The top three are Afghanistan (0), Burkina Faso (0) and Bangladesh (0). The middle country of the 175 has 0.586.

What this measures

Free and fair elections index, in index (0-1). Source: V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. For this measure, higher is better.

Whether elections are run without voter-registration fraud, widespread irregularities, government threats against the opposition, vote buying or election violence. This asks a narrower question than whether a country is a democracy, and one that is easier to answer. A state can run clean elections while barring the opposition from standing. It can also run dirty elections and still change government. It is the clean-elections part of the electoral democracy index. So its pair with that index, and with liberal and participatory democracy, is built from the same numbers and flagged as such.

The full ranking

Each country’s latest figure, from 2025–2025. The year beside each value says when it was measured.

More on free and fair elections

• Countries With the Highest Free and Fair Elections
• Free and fair elections by country: trend over time and what it goes with

Related rankings

• Countries With the Lowest Corruption Perceptions Index
• Countries With the Lowest Political Rights (FH)
• Countries With the Lowest Civil Liberties (FH)
• Countries With the Lowest Trust in Government
• Countries With the Lowest Pre-trial Detainee Shares
• Countries With the Lowest Refugees Originating
• Countries With the Lowest Electoral Democracy
• Countries With the Lowest Liberal Democracy

A ranking describes countries, not the people in them, and a high or low place does not by itself say why. All country rankings.