This introductory chapter situates electoral politics in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) between contestation and control. It traces how elections have become routine yet remain tightly managed. They can register pressure from below, but are organised to shape pluralism and shield incumbents from real challenge. Drawing on debates on electoral and competitive authoritarianism, and on scholarship on authoritarian institutions and democratic backsliding, the chapter advances a functional typology that asks what elections do, for whom, and with what effects. It distinguishes authoritarian systems that hold elections without alternation, hybrid regimes with skewed competition, Israel as the region’s only established democracy, and settings marked by crisis or stalled transition. The country studies that follow examine institutional engineering alongside opposition and abstention, overlapping sovereignties alongside reform debates. Across the volume, elections appear as institutions embedded in distinct configurations of power: they stabilise elite bargains and manage pluralism while projecting sovereignty, and citizens use ballots and abstention, sometimes protest, to press claims. The chapter closes by relating these patterns to wider arguments in political theory about voting and legitimacy, and about how institutions decay.