election monitoring

I’ve been told that crowdsourcing of elections isn’t a wise move. After all, what value will anyone gain from gathering a bunch of yammering “l33t-speak” texting reports from the unwashed masses? Election monitoring should only be done by trained volunteers and their results analyzed by professionals.

This week in Nairobi has been “Election Monitoring” week due to the NDI/DFID meeting on Tue/Wed and the HIVOS meeting on Thur/Fri. Interestingly enough, both meetings heavily addressed the uses, or lack thereof, of technology in the election monitoring process.
One of the ideas that hit me was the need for a toolbox of technical tools that could be used by election monitoring groups and citizens both before, during and after the elections.
Understanding the Framework
Most of us think of an election as an event, I did too. Koki Muli provided us a with a great framework to understand the election process as a whole, using this visualization for everyone to see that it is indeed a long-term process, not an event.

The National Democratic Institute and MobileActive.org are hosting "New Tools for Better Elections", a conference on February 26th on new technologies for fair, representative and equitable elections. In preparation for the event, we sat down with Ian Schuler, Senior Manager of Information and Communications Technology Programs at the National Democratic Institute.

Lebanon will hold a critically important parliamentary election on June 7, and election observers from around the world have descended on the country.  However, as in many other countries now, there are local organizations and citizen efforts on the ground that are using mobile technology for sophisticated election observation efforts.  The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) and the Coalition Libanaise pour l’Observation Elections (CLOE), for example, have put in place an extensive SMS reporting system, for example.