Jeff Fischer currently serves as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University as well as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Democracy and Governance Program. Mr. Fischer teaches graduate-level courses on International Electoral Policy and Practice and conducted the Electoral Policy Study Group and the Evidence and Learning Research Project where Georgetown students researched policy issues for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) before the Agency was dissolved. He is a Senior Advisor for the Master in Electoral Policy and Administration (MEPA) program with the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, and has served as a Visiting Lecturer for the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs and a researcher for the Innovations for Successful Societies program at Princeton University. He is also an independent consultant for election programming.
Mr. Fischer has held three election directorships in internationally supervised elections where electoral security was one of his responsibilities. In 1996, he was appointed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to serve as Director General of Elections for the first post-conflict elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1999, Mr. Fischer was appointed by the United Nations (UN) as Chief Electoral Officer for the Popular Consultation for East Timor. And, in 2000, Mr. Fischer received a joint appointment from the UN and OSCE to head the UN’s Joint Registration Taskforce in Kosovo and served as the OSCE’s Director of Election Operations for municipal elections held that year. He has also served as an election official in the United States as a Commissioner with the Kansas City Board of Elections (1985 – 1990) and a Commissioner on the Missouri Political Finance Review Commission (1991 – 1992).
Mr. Fischer also served as a Senior Advisor to the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan and the UN for its audit of the 2014 presidential election results; and as a member of the Experts Verification Commission of the Organization of Americans States (OAS), auditing the results of the 2010 presidential election in Haiti.
He was the lead writer for two USAID publications concerning electoral security – Electoral Security Framework – Technical Guidance Handbook for Democracy and Governance Officers (2010) and Best Practices in Electoral Security – A Guide for Democracy and Governance Programming (2013). In conducting research for these publications and other programming, he has conducted electoral security assessment in over 15 countries. From 2015 – 2017, he was a Co-Investigator for the Explaining and Mitigating Electoral Violence Project with King’s College London. The purpose of the research is for “developing the conceptual, practical and methodological tools intended to understand violence associated with electoral processes. The research is also seeking to determine the strategies best suited to prevent, managing, and mediating conflict of this type.”
Mr. Fischer has served as a Senior Electoral Advisor with Creative Associates International (2006 – 2022), in various capacities with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) including as its first Executive Vice President and Senior Advisor (1993 – 2006), and as the field project manager for IFES’ first field project in Haiti (1990) and its second in Guyana (1992); and, he has been an expert consultant with such international organizations and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International IDEA, and the OAS.