[1][2][non-primary source needed] One of the project's International Advisory Board, Andrew Reynolds, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted in the Raleigh-based The News & Observer that his home state's 2016 election integrity score was similar to Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.
[3] The study ranked integrity of the state's congressional districts lowest in the nation just below similar outlier Wisconsin.
[4][5] Kaila White of The Arizona Republic described the methodology as being widely trusted and used to compare electoral performance around the world.
"[7] Dylan Matthews writing in Vox agreed that "it seems foolish to infer from that that the US is less of a democracy than Rwanda" but felt that the EIP had highlighted important issues such as gerrymandering and voter registration laws.
[8] Statistician Andrew Gelman critiqued the index as seeming like "an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence", noting among other things that the EIP's 2014 data release[9] has previously given the North Korean parliamentary election an 'electoral integrity' score of 65.3 and Cuba 65.6, higher than elections in EU members Romania and Bulgaria.