Pioneering Open Justice in Mexico’s Highest Electoral Court

To promote the principles of transparency, civic participation, and open justice, the Mexican Electoral Tribunal, The GovLab, and the Burnes Center for Social Change conducted a year-long program with participation from over 1,338 judicial professionals designed to improve the effectiveness of the court. 

The Mexican Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) is Mexico’s highest jurisdictional authority in electoral matters, playing a vital role in strengthening Mexico’s democracy and ensuring the rule of law. To further enhance its work, the Tribunal partnered with Northeastern’s Burnes Center for Social Change and The Governance Lab (The GovLab), to launch an historic Open Justice Initiative designed to enhance the work of the Tribunal.

The Tribunal’s Chief Justice Reyes Rodríguez Mondragón expressed that the goal of the initiative is “to implement a new policy of open justice, to build innovative solutions focused on judicial governance, to define problems and identify improvements in order to build tools that will allow [the Electoral Tribunal] to mainstream open justice as an institutional public policy that serves as a framework for rapprochement with the citizenry.” 

Beth Noveck  Director of the Burnes Center for Social Change and Chief Justice of the Electoral Tribunal in Mexico.

Employee and Stakeholder Workshops 

In July 2022, over 100 participants, including lawyers, academics, civil society representatives and electoral authorities participated in two dialogue and problem definition workshops. The workshops, led by Senior Fellow Dino Cantu and former fellow Laura Marquez, addressed, 1) the importance of open-dialogue, 2) how to support coordination within and outside the court to develop projects, 3) the best practices to update the tools used by the tribunal and 4) the lack of clarity (quantitative and qualitative) on the diversity of people who want to access electoral justice.

First-of-its-Kind Open Innovation Survey

The GovLab/Burnes team also designed and administered a survey to employees of the tribunal.The survey received 1,103 responses, representing 64% of the employees of the Mexican electoral service. Questions asked respondents to identify the main challenges employees face at a personal, organizational and public service level, as well as to identify possible projects and/or solutions to the identified problems; Some of the key findings included:

• Around 46% of the respondents agree that they have the necessary tools to propose new ideas, however they consider that the work pace makes it difficult to propose and implement innovation.
• 55% of those surveyed believe that there is gender equality in the workforce, however, micro-machismo and invisible barriers need to be addressed. 
• A third of participants expressed their excitement in being asked for their opinion regarding the steps the Tribunal should take to improve the user experience as well as the work environment of its staff.

The results of the survey can be accessed here (spanish).

10 Innovation Projects

As a result of the workshops and the survey, the GovLab and the Tribunal launched ten employee-led innovation projects.

Over a hundred professionals are participating in the design and implementation of the projects, which include: 

Project #1:Defining the Electoral Tribunal’s Technology Requirements;

Project #2: Access to Justice, OnlineTrial and Remote Judicial Services;

Project #3: Modernization of the Search Engines;

Project #4: Accompanying groups in vulnerable situations through the sentencing process;

Project #5: Developing Collaborative Projects across the TEPJF; 

Project #6: Designing a Professional Development Program for the TEPJF;

Project #7: Developing a leadership and personal well-being program; 

Project #8: Engaging citizens in the work of the TEPJF;

Project #9: The Creation of a Board of Electoral Courts;

Project #10: Curating the Open Data Portal For the TEPJF;

The GovLab is collaborating with the TEPJF to provide mentoring to help teams develop their projects. Each team is in the process of creating a roadmap to indicate relevant actors, main obstacles, as well as a proposed methodology for the implementation,monitoring and evaluation of each project. The projects will be implemented in the spring of 2023. 

This new work complements earlier work by the GovLab and the Electoral Tribunal to create the world’s first Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) in Spanish and English that teaches judicial and legal reformers how to use data, technology and community engagement to promote Open Justice. The Open Justice Course covers international standards related to justice and transparency,efficiency, fairness,and democracy. During 2022, the GovLab updated the course's open innovation technologies to reflect the new ways of working that emerged after the pandemic. 

The initiative also formed a Technology Advisory Board composed of 15 national and international technical advisors with expertise in state-of-the-art technologies to advise on digitization and technological improvements. 

Through these various projects the Open Justice Initiative is supporting the Mexican Electoral Tribunal to promote technological advances that improve services for residents.

The Initiative is supported by Govlab’s team Dinorah Cantu, Laura Marquez and Valeria Gomez Palacios and is part of the Burnes Center and GovLab’s Open Justice efforts to enable the use of new technology to foster data transparency, courtroom openness, and public engagement in order to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and legitimacy of the courts and promote better public policy.