Dating from 2010’s parliamentary elections, electoral reform has been on the political agenda. Kosovo Assembly, through two ad-hoc commissions founded in 2011, failed to materialize the electoral reform initiative within the anticipated deadline. In 2014, the work of ad-hoc commissions was continued by the Legislation Committee that had taken up the task of finalizing the changes pertaining only to the Law on General Elections, excluding the constitutional ones. The major success achieved by this Committee was the adoption of this law in principle. The early elections held in 2014 prevented the reform, although the changes were very modest compared to initial ambitions. The reform was put at the forefront of the agenda in 2016 by the newly elected President Thaçi who requested, apart from the electoral reform related to parliamentary elections, a change related to the election of the President, from the current option of being elected by the Assembly, into the direct election by the citizens. Opposition political parties boycotted this initiative. Changes proposed by the working groups were never sent to the Assembly for review.

The paper finally proposes the electoral system which the evaluation ascertains as the optimal for Kosovo. This paper comes after several papers that D4D has published about various aspects of elections until now. Several of our previous papers deal with trends, voters list, top electoral shams, the work of the parliamentary reform committee, public opinion survey, as well as the reform process.