Elections are a remarkable way of examining the democratic health of a society. An election is a peaceful hand-off of power from one party to another. In developed nations, what lies behind this shift in leadership is often taken for granted; a new set of people now control the military, intelligence, and decision making process of an entire nation. What was once only rhetoric from a politician’s mouth becomes a physical reality. With all this at stake, it really is an amazing thing when election results are respected by all participants. Unfortunately, in many countries all sorts of steps are taken to ensure power stays in the hands of one party. This is why conflicts continue to erupt over elections, and why oppressive regimes are so afraid of the ballot box. This is why free and fair elections are so important.
In most countries, there is a governmental agency that assures the integrity of elections. This agency is supposed to be a non-partisan participant in elections, enforcing rules and solving disputes so that everything runs smoothly. However, if a government is corrupt, there is little guarantee that their election monitoring body isn’t infected by that same corruption. Even if the results are legitimate, if the body doesn’t have credibility there is more ground to contest results, which could lead to conflict.
In order to address these concerns, non-governmental election monitoring agencies, whether international or part of that country’s civil society, step in. However, there are many challenges that these agencies face. Limited resources, trouble reaching rural populations, and adversarial ruling parties all pose a threat to election monitors. This is why election monitoring agencies are innovating in the ways they collect and monitor election data, and are increasingly turning to the power of the crowd.
When you think of crowdsourcing, you probably think of Kickstarter, or Gofundme, websites that get thousands of small donations to fund innovative and risky projects. While this is still a huge application of crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing’s potential has been increasingly harnessed to address social and environmental challenges. A big player in this brand of crowdsourcing is Ushahidi, a non-profit software company whose origin was in a Kenyan election dispute. The election results were widely suspected, and violence broke out. In order to hold those accountable, Ushahidi created a software that allowed anyone to report acts of violence via SMS or email, then placed those reports on google maps for all to see. This was revolutionary, as it decentralized power from institutions to millions of citizens, expanding the network’s reach enormously.
Today Ushahidi allows anyone to download their software and customize it to their needs. Many international election monitoring organizations use similar crowdsourcing models. The Carter Center has done so in Nepal, as has Democracy International in Tunisia. There are many advantages to crowdsourced election monitoring. First, it is a viable solution for mistrust in Election Monitoring Bodies. You no longer have to trust your government, nor huge western NGO’s. Information is coming from you and your fellow citizens. This promotes transparency, as well as empowers individuals to take a vested interest in the democratic process. Crowdsourcing also increases the reach of election monitoring bodies, who in monitoring elections are faced with an overwhelming task. It is impossible to be everywhere at once, especially in rural places where polling centers are hard to reach. Election monitoring agencies now have eyes and ears everywhere; every citizen is their own advocate. This enhances government accountability, since they don’t know who exactly is monitoring them. Administrative jobs are now made easier too, as time processing forms is decreased tremendously since many forms are automated.
That’s not to say that crowdsourcing is not without its disadvantages. If a concerted effort is made to make false reports or silence citizens who are trying to report violations, election monitors can get false data. This concern is valid, and is always a possibility when using crowdsourced data. However, there is a way to circumvent it using something called bounded crowdsourcing. The idea behind bounded crowdsourcing is quite simple: know your network. One variation of bounded crowdsourcing works like this: four trusted people are invited to participate in an election monitoring network. Trusted can mean anything, but in the best case scenario, these are people trained and familiar with election monitoring criteria and protocol. Each of these four people are able to invite four people take part in the network, the only condition being that these four people are credible individuals. This repeats until there is a large network of people that are monitoring the elections. The idea is to have a decentralized network of people who are seen as “extraordinarily credible. “ While this is far from perfect, it definitely decreases the susceptibility of crowdsourcing efforts to manipulation.
This is still a new field, but it is growing rapidly. Because most of the people using crowdsourced election monitoring models make their programs open-source, literally anyone with access to a computer can create their own election monitoring software. The access point to these networks, a cell-phone with text messaging capabilities, is relatively low, and thus opens up the election monitoring field to groups with fewer resources. Crowdsourcing is a wonderful application of technology to democracy, and has already made elections more transparent around the world. Crowdsourcing is making sure democracy is staying democratic, and that people’s voices are continuing to be heard.
William Christou – IQLatino