Haiti has experienced a string of contentious elections since the late 1980s. Parliamentary elections in May 2000 were marked by violence and administrative irregularities, most typically the late opening of polling stations. Chaotic delivery of the ballot boxes to the electoral commission after the elections (some poll workers simply left ballot boxes outside the commission's building, unguarded overnight, because they could not find room inside) also raised the specter of electoral malfeasance. Despite these problems, observers described the elections, in which incumbent Aristide's Lavalas Party candidates were expected to win, as “generally credible.” However, even before the official results were announced, the Lavalas Party declared victory, and opposition parties called for the election results to be annulled. International donors reacted to these events by threatening to suspend aid to Haiti. Opposition parties objected to the preliminary results that showed Lavalas winning most of the available senate seats and withdrew their candidates from the runoff elections. But it was Lavalas supporters who protested, demanding that the final results be released and that the OAS recognize the Lavalas victory as legitimate. The resulting conflict caused the head of Haiti's election commission to flee to the Dominican Republic and then to the United States.

Opposition parties in Haiti boycotted the November presidential election that year on the grounds that the government had cheated in the May parliamentary elections to pave the way for Aristide's reelection. Although the November election appeared to be less violent than some previous contests, bombings still occurred, and the OAS criticized it as being held without attention to “critical deficiencies” of the current system. Aristide won the election, but international aid remained suspended on the grounds that the opposition complaints needed to be resolved. The opposition refused to meet with Aristide in a standoff that persisted for nearly two years, at which point the United States suggested unblocking aid to Haiti in September 2002, with certain conditions, which included the creation of a new election management body. The OAS eventually succeeded in receiving agreement from both the incumbent and the opposition on the terms proposed by the United States. This agreement, however, did not alleviate political tensions in Haiti, and by 2004, Aristide had been forced out of office. UN peacekeepers then occupied Haiti for two years and fresh elections were held in 2006.

The major election boycott during the October 2000 presidential elections in Cote d’Ivoire sparked a wave of domestic unrest and international pressure that ultimately prevented the incumbent, General Robert Guei, who had been brought out of retirement by the junta that took control of the country during a coup the previous December, from taking office. The two main opposition parties, the Rally of the Republicans (RDR) and the Democratic Party of the Cote d’Ivoire-African Democratic Party (PDCI-RCA), boycotted the presidential elections after prominent candidates were disqualified on the basis of hastily passed pre-election legislation requiring candidates’ parents to have been born in Cote d’Ivoire. Opposition supporters followed the boycott with post-election demonstrations, in which acts of violence occurred, though the bulk of that violence seemed to come from police forces firing on demonstrators. International reaction among democracy promoters including the United States, France, and the EU was decidedly negative. The United States went so far as to declare the elections illegitimate, and France – Cote d’Ivoire's former colonial master – threatened to impose sanctions. Although Guei initially declared himself the winner of the election, international pressure and domestic protests caused him to flee before the results were official, and the sole opposition candidate who was allowed to remain in the race, Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivoirain Popular Front (FPI), was sworn in as president.

On June 15, 2009, a week after opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi lost the Iranian presidential election, the streets of the capital city of Tehran were overflowing with hundreds of thousands of protesters. On losing, Moussavi characterized the victory of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a “coup,” made a public plea to the international community not to accept the results of the election (Borger and Black 2009), and called on his supporters to rally in protest (Worth and Fathi 2009). Iranian citizens responded with the largest public demonstrations in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 (Fathi 2009).

Not more than six months later, the main opposition candidate for president in Afghanistan, Abdollah Abdollah, boycotted that country's runoff election. When his opponent – the current Afghan president, Hamid Karzai – reluctantly consented to a runoff (after asserting he had won the first round of voting outright), Abdollah, who had finished second, demanded a number of administrative changes to prevent a recurrence of electoral malfeasance, which he alleged had occurred during the first round of the election. Formal talks ensued, with no small amount of U.S. diplomatic involvement, but ultimately this effort did not persuade Karzai to meet Abdollah's demands. The challenger subsequently boycotted the election, refusing to participate in the second round of voting (Filkins and Rubin 2009).

After Guyana's president Cheddi Jagan died in 1997, his wife Janet assumed the office for the People's Progressive Party (PPP) and won reelection to the presidency in December of that same year. The opposition People's National Congress (PNC) began protest demonstrations on December 19, the day she was sworn into office, and those protests continued into January. In addition to near-daily street demonstrations, four separate bombing incidents were reported during this time. In two cases the bomb attacks targeted public buildings – a hotel in the capital city of Georgetown and a TV station – and it was unclear who was responsible, though the president blamed opposition supporters in at least one case. The other two incidents clearly targeted incumbent and opposition political actors. One homemade bomb was detonated outside of the home of an influential opposition supporter, and other bombs were found and defused outside of the home of President Jagan.

In mid-January, amid continuing demonstrations, a delegation from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) arrived to broker a resolution to the month-long political tension. This intervention resulted in a negotiated agreement between the opposition PNC and incumbent PPP to establish a constitutional commission that would make recommendations to reduce political conflict in the country. As part of the agreement, new elections would be held within a year and a half, thereby allowing time to implement the commission's recommended reforms. In the meantime, both parties agreed to an audit process for the previous election, to address opposition concerns about manipulation.