Annual Thematic Report
2026 Report
The Annual Thematic Report, established as a new ERRN initiative in 2026, is produced under the aegis of the ERRN Research Council. The Report entails a year-long annual research project conducted through collaboration between electoral commission staff and academic researchers. It aims to address a specified theme of practical policy relevance to all member commissions.
2026 Report: Maintaining Public Confidence in Elections
The 2026 Report will be produced by a three-person team based at Griffith University in Queensland. It will be published at the end of 2026. Find more information on the report in the Call for Expressions of Interest at the link below.
2026 Report Authors
The 2026 report authors are a three-person team based at the University of Queensland. Together they have extensive expertise in researching public confidence in elections. They also have very significant experience of producing policy-focused research for, and in collaboration with, electoral commissions, other state bodies, and international organisations. Read their biographies below.
-
Ferran is a Professor and ARC Future Fellow at Griffith University. Ferran has extensive expertise in elections, electoral integrity, political parties and electoral behaviour. His work combines quantitative and qualitative research approaches. His institutional experience includes roles at the University of Sydney’s Electoral Integrity Project and at the Centro de Investigaciones y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City.
He has published in world-leading political science journals such as Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, or Environmental Politics. He currently holds a Future Fellowship on Resilient elections: How to Strengthen Our Democracies and a Linkage project on informal voting in collaboration with the Electoral Commission of Queensland
-
Max is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University. He contributes specialist expertise on public trust, digital information environments, and the effects of information disorder on citizens’ confidence in political institutions. His research, published in leading journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, and Political Communication, examines how mis- and disinformation undermine public confidence in elections and identifies strategies election management bodies can use to mitigate these effects.
Grömping has pioneered computational text analysis and advanced quantitative approaches for studying political communication and has advocated for open science principles in political science, including in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He currently co-leads an ARC-funded Discovery Project on Mapping & Harnessing Public Mistrust. He is a member of the Electoral Integrity Project‘s International Advisory Board, of which Martinez i Coma is also a member, and one of 200 founding affiliates of the International Panel on the Information Environment.
-
Anurug is a Research Fellow at Griffith University. He provides complementary strengths, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches with computational methods, including natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, to study electoral and democratic resilience, among other topics.
His research has appeared in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Environmental Research Letters, Conflict, Security & Development, and International Peacekeeping, demonstrating applied expertise in computational and mixed-methods research on elections, conflict, and crisis governance through internationally funded projects supported by the Australian Research Council, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the British Academy, and UNDP.
ERRN Research Council
Established in 2025, the purpose of the ERRN Research Council is to better enable the Network to assist electoral commissions in meeting their research needs. The Research Council provides a framework for electoral commissions to collaborate on selecting research themes and jointly fund the production of research on issues that affect the work of all commissions.
The Research Council thereby assists in achieving the central aim of ERRN to promote research relating to electoral regulation amongst academics, electoral commissions and other interested groups.
Current Members
The current members of the Research Council are the electoral commissions of New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria.
Co-Chairs
The 2026 Co-Chairs are Pat Vidgen PSM, Electoral Commissioner of Queensland, and Professor Tom Daly, Director of ERRN.