"Lithuania continues to score well on most Nations in Transit indicators, but it suffered a downgrade on electoral process in 2012 due to a record-breaking number of incidents of voter fraud in the October 2012 parliamentary elections," the Freedom House's Nations in Transit 2013 report reads.
The annual report is a comparative study of democratic development in 29 countries from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe to Eurasia with non-democratic regimes in the past. In this group of countries, Lithuania came in sixth and is among eight countries with consolidated democracies, according to the Freedom House.
Among new EU member states, Lithuania is ahead of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia, but lags behind Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
Meanwhile, consolidated authoritarian regimes are in place in neighboring Russia and Belarus as well as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, the Freedom House says.
The remaining countries received various scores between democracy and authoritarian.
