<p><span class="p-body">The event kicked off with a presentation by two current CGA graduate students, Claudette Segura and Fathurrahman Al-Fikry, who created a Global Elections database to track the record-breaking year in elections when 64 countries will go to the polls representing a combined population of about 49% of the people in the world. The database tracks items such as GDP, size of the electorate, historical turnout, and democracy index. The project was created recently as a part of Professor Sidhu's International Relations course as a way to analyze the relationship between democracy and election turnout.</span></p>