Markus Pollak is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna and a DOC Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Moreover, he worked as an external lecturer in Political Science at the University of Vienna (2025/26) and was a CEFRES–CEU fellow and researcher-in-residence at the OSCE Documentation Centre in Prague (2026). In particular, he examines the contestation of established election observation institutions, parallel election observation, and the political sociology of the field of election observation. Markus is also an election observer and research associate at the NGO Election-Watch.EU. As part of OSCE ODIHR missions, he has most recently been deployed to the United States (2024), Kazakhstan (2022), Uzbekistan (2023) and Serbia (2023). Moreover, he worked as EU election observer in Bolivia (2025).