Elections – Page 2 – Integra LLC

Anti-corruption, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Social media buzz about Cameroon’s elections reveals widespread concerns

Cameroon’s October 9^th presidential election is fast approaching, and social media is being used to create a dialogue, raise concerns and share information about the event.

Paul Baya billboard, running for Cameroonians elections

Photo credit: CNN

The country’s incumbent, Paul Biya of the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, has been in power for 30 years despite general dissatisfaction and outcries for the president to step down. There are currently 23 candidates in the race with John Fru Ndi of the Social Democratic Front running a distant second to Biya.

The blogging community, Global Voices, is running special coverage entitled Cameroon Elections 2011 that features blog posts from citizens around the world about the elections. The bloggers have discussed various issues surrounding the election, many accusing Biya of election corruption such as paying off politicians to falsely run against him.

CNN has reported on Biya’s “complacent attitude” since he has not been campaigning in the field. His behavior implies that Biya “plans to win through election rigging and fraud.” Youth are allegedly being paid by Biya to support the leader in the streets, and nearly all government campaigning money has been distributed to his party alone.

The Twitter community is also closely following the election, sharing articles, information, and social media tools with one another. A site that has been Tweeted frequently is one that keeps track of the election search trends. Through the tool, anyone can see which party leader or election issues are being searched the most on Google.

Cameroon election search trends on Google

Cameroon Election Search Trends, from http://www.google.cm/intl/en/landing/elections/2011/

Social media has allowed those interested in Cameroon’s elections to share information in ways that were never possible before. But the country lags far behind others in the region in terms of Internet penetration rates. With only 5% of the country having Internet access, most citizens will not be able to follow the social media that is providing critical perspectives on the election. Were the majority of the country’s citizens able to follow the elections online, there might be more potential for a nation-wide movement against Biya and his alleged election rigging.

October 5, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Recipe for Democratic Entrenchment: Expert discusses the role of ICTS in advancing democratization

On September 15^th, George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs presented a guest lecture by Dr. Philip N. Howard about the role of ICTs in advancing democratization, especially in Muslim countries.

Howard, an expert scholar on the role of ICTs in political systems, based his lecture on research conducted in 75 countries in transition. The findings can be found in full in his book, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. An aspect of the lecture that was particularly fascinating was Howard’s “recipe” for democratic entrenchment – one that involves state capacity and a vibrant, tech-savvy wired civil society. He highlighted the ability of social media to monitor government elections.

The lecture, which emphasized the use of ICTs as a successful tool in promoting democratic societies, can be found in the video below.

So who’s next on the agenda for a revolution using Howard’s recipe? He says to think of countries that have a wired civil society + active online journalists + good state capacity; then watch those countries during the next major elections. If the heads of the countries try to rig the elections, there is a good possibility that their citizens will protest, creating chaos, uprisings, and possible transition to a new state in the same vein as Egypt. Howard lists several countries to look out for, such as Algeria, Iran and Kuwait.

Howard’s research focused primarily on Muslim countries, but one wonders if other countries might fit the recipe for civil society protests and/or revolution. Several African countries have elections coming up. Kenya, which has one of the most vibrant and open technology sectors, but a history of allegedly rigged elections, could be one to watch during the 2012 elections.

October 5, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Asia, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Eastern Europe, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Where we work

e-Government: a novel approach in tackling governance challenges?

The World Bank approved in June a $20 million credit to support Moldova’s Governance e-Transformation (GeT) project. According to Philippe Dongier, World Bank ICT sector manager, eTransformation is “about leadership commitment for institutional reform and for citizen-centric governance.”

The project is part of a Government initiative to address Moldova’s legacy of corruption and bureaucracy inherited during the Soviet Union era by improving and modernizing public sector governance and increasing citizen access to government services.

As part of an institutional reform, the Government established in August 2010 an e-Government Center charged to develop a “digital transformation policy, a government IT strategy, and an open data roadmap”. In April, Moldova became one of the first countries in the region to launch an open data portal.

“The initiative is aimed at opening government data for citizens and improving governance and service delivery,” says Stela Mocan, executive director of the e-Government Center.

Benefits of GeT

GeT has several intended benefits that include increased transparency. The Ministry of Finance recently released a spreadsheet of more than one million lines, detailing all public spending data from the past five years.

“Publishing information about public funds will increase transparency,” says Prime Minister Vlad Filat

GeT also intends to reduce the cost of public service delivery. Through “cloud computing” infrastructure—in which applications and data are accessible from multiple network devices—the Government also expects significant savings in public sector IT expenditure.

Promoting innovation in the civil society sector is another key feature of the project. The Bank’s Civil Society Fund in Moldova—which provides grants to nongovernmental and civil society organizations—is supporting the National Environment Center in the collection and mapping of information on pollution of water resources. Since 80% of Modova’s rural population use water from nitrate-polutated wells, this initiative aims to empower citizens with the necessary tools to hold the Government accountable on the environmental policy.

E-Government: a worldwide phenomen

According to the Wolrd Bank, “e-Government” is the use by government agencies of information technologies—such as Internet, and mobile computing—that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government.

Moldova is not the only country using ICTs as part of an innovative approach to address corruption and strengthen democracy.

Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan of the State of Maharashtra in Western India recently launched an e-Governance program that aims to tackle corruption by reducing personal interaction between the public and government officials and requiring government officials to use computers in their day-to-day operations. Limiting discretion and facilitating the process of tracking all transactions decrease the incidence of corruption.

To combat fraudulent activities during elections, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) upgraded its computer and communication network in 2002 to verify the eligibility of voters who had lost their voting cards or whose names were missing from the manual voter registers in the respective polling stations.

ICTs’ potential for addressing governance challenges is significant. Through increased transparency and accountability, governments can better serve their citizens. Implementing successful e-Government initiatives in developing countries is a challenging endeavor. However, sustained political commitment to institutional reform, citizen-centric policies, and financial backing create an environment where ICT applications can improve governance.

September 20, 2011/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Elections, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

How social media can bring trust to Guinea’s 2011 elections

The following post is the response given to oAfrica by Francoise Stovall, Interactive Communications Manager at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). Guinea’s legislative elections are to be held on 11/27/2011. How can Nigeria’s experience with crowdsourcing apply to Guinea, a nation where social media is less prominent and fact often gets tangled with fiction?

In support of open & accountable democratic institutions around the globe {NDI}

Question: What’s your take on how mobile or social media can facilitate trust & communication in the upcoming #Guinea elections?
Answer: NDI’s Technology team, drawing upon its regional and global experience in this realm, has the following response:
Social media provides a way for election officials to share information about what’s going on, communicate it to an engaged audience, and build public trust in the electoral process. For example, in the 2011 Nigerian elections, Nigeria’s Independent National Election Commission (INEC) did a wonderful job of communicating over twitter and other social media channels. However, it’s important to note that this type of dialogue requires proactive engagement and interest from such organizations. It provides a way to directly engage with those organizations publicly – if people see incidents or violations, they can communicate them to the authorities who can (theoretically) themselves respond. Using a collective hashtag on Twitter (if there is enough of an internal user base to make it viable) is a way for citizens to self-aggregate and share information. Eg, if the tag is #guinea11 then people can use it in their tweets to connect to all the folks communicating on the topic.

Citizen reporting can provide an avenue for people to share stories of legal violations, as mentioned above, but can also be a way to name-and-shame electoral code of conduct violations if that has been established. If there are CSOs who are attempting to collect and manage citizen reports it can be a good way to hold officials accountable for violations. There are significant challenges with such a “crowdsourcing” program, but in the right place can be a powerful methodology.

In the Guinean context, establishing public trust in the electoral process is indeed a challenge. Beyond the advantages of using social media and new technology to connect citizens to government, it’s also important to recognize the flipside of this: Social media can be the perfect way to spread pure rumor and hearsay – or worse, malicious, inflammatory information. It can prove an opportunity for the online community to work together to try to verify reports and quash misinformation. To enhance the transparency and credibility of Guinea’s upcoming legislative elections, NDI will be working with its local partner Consortium for Domestic Election Observation (CODE) to deploy citizen observers to polling sites around the country on election day to independently and systematically collect, analyze, and report information about election-day proceedings. As part of this effort, CODE and NDI, drawing on regional and international best practices, will explore ways to use social media, or to partner with organizations that are doing so, in order to better achieve its goals.

CODE used cell phone technology in its last observation effort (the country’s presidential elections of 2010) for improved reporting speed. CODE’s 2000+ citizen observers covered 20% of Guinea’s polling stations, and the coalition’s calculated election results were within 1 percent of those announced by the CENI.

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Learn more about upcoming African elections and how you can support government accountability: Connect with NDI on Facebook | Follow NDI on Twitter | Give to NDI

September 6, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Rule of Law

Measuring and Assessing Gov 2.0, Election Monitoring, & Citizen Media

This summer I have wrote a lot about good governance programs to fight corruption, improve government effectiveness and accountability, and how they they are crucial to developing countries economic development, overall prosperity, and empowerment of civil society. One issue, however, can be the monitoring and evaluation of democracy and governance projects, which can sometimes be difficult–public opinion surveys as a form of measurement can be fraudulent, or uneven, and systems can be disorderly. Although ICTs are not a panacea for a development, they can help to streamline democratic and good governance strategies, and embolden civil society to play a participatory role. Some of the ways ICTs can be employed in democracy and governance projects, such as e-government strategies, election monitoring systems and enabling citizen media, can drastically improve the efficiency of these initiatives. Based on what I have learned so far, below are suggestions for monitoring and evaluation for an e-governance strategy, how to implement an election monitoring system from the beginning til the end, and how best to measure the effectiveness of citizen media:

1. E-government and Participation

Benefits: Transparency can be enhanced through the free sharing of government data based on open standards. Citizens are empowered to question the actions of regulators and bring up issues. The ability of e-government to handle speed and complexity can also underpin regulatory reform. E-government can add agility to public service delivery to help governments respond to an expanded set of demands even as revenues fall short.

First, on the project level, question if the inputs used for implementation and direct deliverables were actually produced. The government’s progression or regression should not rely solely on this because there are other outside variables. For the overall implementation, ask if the resources requested in place, and were the benchmarks that were set reached? Featured below is a timeline on how to implement a good e-government strategy.

Source: ITU

2. Strengthen Rule of Law with Crowdsource Election monitoring:

Benefits: Support for election monitoring may be provided prior to and/or during national or local elections and can encourage citizens to share reports from their community about voting crimes, ballot stuffing and map these crimes using Ushahidi. By documenting election crimes, it can provide evidence of corrupt practices by election officials, and empower citizens to become more engaged.
Drawbacks: Publicizing information to the broad public means without checking the information’s validity these systems can be abused in favor of one political party or the other, and elections can be highly contested.

Photo Credit: movement.org

Below are systematic instructions on how to implement the “all other stuff” needed for a election monitoring system, like Ushahidi:

Step 1. Create a timeline that includes goals you have accomplished by different marker points leading up to the election, and reaching target audiences

Step 2. The more information reports the better for the platform, but consider a primary goal and focus on filtering information about that goal to the platform, put it in the About section.

Step 3. Target your audience and know how they can be reached for example

Community partners
Crowd
Volunteers

Step 4. Figure out who your allies are—NGOs and civil society organizations that will want to support, and provide resources for more free and fair elections in your country. Figure out what groups would be best for voter education, voter registration drives, civic engagement or anti-corruption. Building a new strategy on top of the already existing ones will help to promote the campaign and making it more sustainable overtime.

Step 5. Reach out and meet with the groups you have targeted—and make sure to identify people from that country living abroad, reach out to the diaspora. Ask yourself the following questions when the program is implemented: should all reports be part of the same platform? Should reports come in before voting begins or just offenses taking place during elections? What about outreach after the election takes place for follow-up M&E?

Step 6. Get the word out to as many citizens as possible using flyers, local media, and target online influencers, such as those on Twitter or Facebook. Attract volunteers to assist in the overall outreach and publicity plan—a volunteer coordinator, technical advisor and, if possible, a verification team or local representatives, to relay and confirm what monitoring the electoral processes is all about.

Step 7. Information sources:

Mobiles: Frontline SMS can work as reception software for submissions via text.
Email/Twitter/Facebook: Consider creating a web form to link people to on social networks which asks for everything you need, including, detailed location information, category and multimedia.
Media Reports and Journalists: Have volunteers look in the news for relevant information to be included in the reports
Verification team: Either a local organization or journalist works best—on site that is able to receive alerts from the platform on events happening around their polling stations to be able to verify what is going on. Cuidemos el Voto modeled Ushahidi slightly for incoming reports from whitelisted people to show up automatically, for example non-governmental election monitoring organizations.

Step 9. Monitoring and Evaluation

Closing the loop of information: How will you show citizens who provided information on electoral fraud that you received it? Have a system in place to tell community representatives that the information was received and it will be acted upon.
How will you act on that information in the country’s courtrooms, though? Make sure to preserve the documentation of election fraud that your platform has received so that it can serve to hold the perpetrators accountable in court.

3. Citizen Media

Citizen media allows content to be produced by private citizens outside of large media conglomerates and state run media outlets to tell their stories and provide bottom up information. Also known as citizen journalism, participatory media, and democratic media, citizen media is burgeoning with all of the technological tools and systems available that simplify the production and distribution of media

Benefits: In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, citizen media also allows a sense of community where up-to date news covers a variety of angles, stories, and topics found in hard to reach places.
Drawbacks: It can be risky for the citizens journalists and their supporters. They can be identified and targeted by members of the oppression, where they will be put in jail or tortured. There is no gatekeeping, verifying, or regulating the information—this is not a problem when it comes to video or photos, but definitely with information. Also, connectivity issues may not allow citizens to upload the information.
Helpful Resources: This journalist’s toolkit is a training site for multimedia and online journalists.
Monitoring and Evaluation for citizen media projects: Governments have foreign policy and economic agendas that guide their choices on how they fund projects, therefore, it’s important that the grantees and activists understand and share the same objectives. This is also beneficial to learn from projects over time to avoid redundancy and enhance efficiency of implementation.
Measurement approaches—Some corporate funding agencies like the Gates Foundation, Skoll Foundation, and Omidyar Network insist on measuring citizen media projects, while other funding agencies like the Knight Foundation insist less on measurement. It’s important to measure both quantitative and qualitative outcomes and give constructive feedback to the contributors so that they can become more effective.

Quantitative—Objectives may sometimes change in response to your context, but keep the end goal in mind, continue to measure yourself against the objectives. This can be done through web analytics or web metrics—website performance monitoring service to understand and optimize website usage
Qualitative—Primarily anecdotal and used to shift policy objectives. In the end, however, it’s about visualizing the change you are trying to bring in the world, and making it happen.

August 4, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

#ArabSpring Activists on How 140 Characters Help Unite

Syrian protests with a coffin being carried through the crowd

Photo Credit: Reuters

Current discourse on the Arab Spring excludes social media as the sole perpetuator of the movement—but scholars and activists alike, agree that technology has helped to unify and project, citizen’s feeling of dissent.

My previous post about last Wednesday’s Future Tense event explored some speaker’s discussion on the West’s connection with new technologies, as either aiding or embedding the revolution.

Other panelists, however, elicited a more homegrown, internal perception on how the uprisings evolved.

Merlyna Lim, Professor of at the Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Social Transformation – Justice and Social Inquiry Program at Arizona State University, discussed origins of anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt.

She claimed it was rooted before the Tahir moment occurred, stemming from three stages of organization—networks, narratives and claim making—to mobilize collective action.

The first protest organized exclusively online, without physical headquarters, was arranged by Kefaya in 2004. Using a website called Misr Digital, Lim recalls, the organizers increased the reach of the oppositions movement through the websites by engaging weak ties.

After the death of Khaled Said on June 6, 2010, the participatory youth culture, added emotions onto their organizational network’s narrative—and Egyptians feared being killed.

Khaled Said’s passing changed Egyptian’s view on human rights violations, the panelist stated. While it was once an abstract narrative, they are now saw concrete infringements by the regime—such as corruption, torture, and eventual death.

Egyptians shared these contentions, spreading them by networks. “The Tahir moment was facilitated by cabs, signs, cell phones, word of mouth, SMS, and social media provided the organizing platform,” Lim alluded.

Ahmed Al Omran & Oula Alrifai Photo Credit: New America Foundation

Another panel convened by Oula Alrifai and Ahmed al-Omran discussed their firsthand perspectives on the violence in Syria, and the political and social issues of Saudi Arabia.

Alrifai, a Syrian youth activist discussed the origins of the Syrian protests. With no independent media and post-imprisonment of an Al Jazeera correspondent, she stated, social media and video were the only ways to get information about the revolutions to the outside work.

However, the connections to do so were not always available.

For activists, using cell phones with cameras was the easiest way to take pictures and record videos, but since they had no networks in the ground someimtes they had to cross the borders. Some activists, “were crossing the borders to go to Jordan to download the videos in Internet cafés and (would) come back and fight again or be on the street and protest, risking their lives,” Alrifai said.

Ahmed al-Omran, a blogger for his site saudijeans.org, discussed the excitement many have felt across the Gulf of the revolutions.

Though the demand for freedom and justice in his home country of Saudi Arabia is similar, the dynamic is different—elections do not exist, and Saudis are largely politically unaware because citizens are not allowed to, “practice politics”.

Ahmed only became aware of politics when he started blogging in 2004, as he was not raised discussing the government, but social media gave him an outlet to learn about them. “I think that the Internet and social media has given this generation a space where they can express themselves and engage with one another and talk about the issues that are typically hard to talk about in the public sphere,” he said.

Ahmed also stated that an uprising similar to Egypt will be difficult in Saudi Arabia because of the monarchy, but predicts it will occur because time is on the people’s side. “Money is a short term resolution, these issues need a fundamental solution,” Ahmed poignantly observed, “At some point the money will run out, the oil revenues will not be there forever”.

Though opinions vary on how imperative social media was to aiding the Arab Spring uprisings, almost all scholars and activists agree—it is an organizational tool that can bring like-minded individuals to collaborate for change.

July 20, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Rule of Law

Gov 2.0: Open Data Shaping Kenya’s Future

The President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, watches a demonstration of the Huduma platform at the Kenya Open Government Data Portal launch, looking on is Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication

The President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, watches a demonstration Photo Credit: Ushahidi

Last Friday, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki inaugurated the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI), an online resource to catalog and display the government’s expenditures—launching the ICT pioneering country into a new epoch of transparency and accountability.

The new initiative is a crucial step for Kenyan citizens to monitor public spending amid previous corrupt practices, including the alleged manipulation of the 2007 elections.

Kenya ranked 154 out of 178 total countries in Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index.

Screenshot of Kenyan open data initative

Screenshot of KODI

The KODI contains 160 datasets arranged by country-level and county, and is organized within various sectors, including: education, energy, health, population, poverty, along with water and sanitation. Information for the datasets were taken from national census, government ministries, and information from the World Bank.

Prior to creating this information platform, the Kenyan government seldom made statistics and information on these sectors publicly available, or would postpone their release.

Now, however, they are taking a participatory approach to following the new 2010 Kenyan Constitution requiring the government to make information on the country publicly accessible.

On its homepage, the KODI website asserts the new transformation taking place:

Our information is a national asset, and it’s time it was shared: this data is key to improving transparency; unlocking social and economic value; and building Government 2.0 in Kenya

The platform allows citizens to actively engage on the information they want, and need to know.

Users of the open data portal can create interactive charts and tables, and developers can download the raw data to build applications for web and mobile. Additionally, users can press a “suggest a dataset” icon, which aggregates the requests for new information and sorts them according to relevance.

According to the Guardian, Kenyans have already made mass requests for data on youth unemployment, libraries, crime, and the locations of primary and secondary schools.

The data portal is managed by the Kenya ICT Board in partnership with the World Bank, and is powered by Socrata.

In addition to managing the data, the Kenya ICT Board plans to award groups and individuals who configure the data advantageously, intending to give out up to thirty grants to those with the best ideas.

A series of valuable initiatives have already been taking place.

Huduma (Kiswahili for “service”), derived from Ushaidi, has already started to use statistics collected on health, infrastructure, and education to compare the provision of aid across different districts of Kenya. Business Daily, a Nairobi-based news service, had announced plans to publish a series of articles on the newly released applications and services. Virtual Kenya built an application mapping counties where Members of Parliament declined to pay taxes.

Screenshot of Ushahidi's Huduma

Kenyan entrepreneurs are now in charge of publicizing this information and making it user-friendly.

Though the Kenyan government has been lambasted for a lack of transparency and accountability in the past, this open source data program allows Kenyan citizens to recognize development challenges and foster their own solutions—leading themselves and their county into a new era of progressive growth.

July 15, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Asia, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Where we work

#Berish2.0: The Ire of Malaysian Protests

Photo Credit: Saeed Khan/AFP

Social media may have helped fuel the 50,000 demonstrators who gathered in Kuala Lumpur this past Saturday demanding electoral reforms—despite the Malaysian government responding roughly and deeming the peaceful protests illegal.

Police fired tear gas and water cannons at the dissidents demanding change from a electoral system that they claim has unjustly favored the ruling party since the country’s independence from Britain in 1957.

The recent rally puts pressure on Prime Minister Najib Razak in the racially stimulated Southeast Asian nation, as Malaysia’s next general election is planned for 2013.

Peaceful protesters in Malaysia’s capital were met with police violence, and 1,667 arrests over the span of the weekend, according to reports. In lieu of the aggressive response, Amnesty International urged the UK government yesterday to press Najib to honor the freedom of assembly

“As a current member of the UN Human Rights Council, the Malaysian government should be setting an example to other nations and promoting human rights. Instead they appear to be suppressing them, in the worst campaign of repression we’ve seen in the country for years”, Donna Guest, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Asia-Pacific. Amnesty International, states.

Bersih (The Coalition for Fair and Clean Elections) is the oppositional NGO that organized the electoral reform movement called Bersih 2.0.

Bershish 2.0 Poster

The original Berish protests occurred on November 23, 2006 in the Malaysian Parliament, such attendees included political party leaders, civil society groups and NGOs, including People’s Justice Party (PKR) president, Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail

The electoral reform demands of Berish 2.0, also known as 709, can be summarized in the eight following points:

Clean the electoral roll
Reform postal ballot
Use of indelible ink
Minimum 21 days campaign period
Free and fair access to media
Strengthen public institutions
Stop corruption
Stop dirty politics

Social media’s role in the Malaysian movement was to coordinate groups and record demonstrations.

As of today, the Berish 2.0 Facebook page had over 169,000 fans calling for Najib’s resignation, and the official Twitter account had close to 18,000 fans.

Though there are 10 million Facebook users in Malaysia, the preferred social media platform, protesters shared information over Twitter on how to circumvent sealed off roads and closed train stations to get to the protests.

@ask_ivan's Google map of the Malaysian government's roadblocks

While Facebook and Twitter were used for mobilization purposes, videos circulated on Youtube broadcast the movement to the world.

Over the span of the weekend 2,000 Youtube videos were uploaded with 2,774,812 total views based on the single keyword “Bersih 2.0″ on YouTube

As the case with the Arab Spring protests, the truth behind the movement is told by first hand perspectives of civil society, not the political parties. Social media is not a panacea current uprisings, but rather serve as a medium for organization and propagate that truth.

July 12, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Using Mobiles to Monitor the 2011 Nigerian Elections

woman placing paper ballot for Nigerian elections

Photo Credit: DailyMail

For many of the 73 million registered voters in Nigeria, the decision they were faced with on election day was not just who to vote for, but how to cast their ballot safely.

This year’s election, only the 3rd national election held in Nigeria since military rule ended in 1999 was fraught with difficulties and confusion, including two postponements of the election after what officials call “logistical problems.” Previous votes- in 2003 and 2007 – were marred by allegations of widespread ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and violence.

Amidst this backdrop, Nigerian voters turned to social media and mobile apps to help them make their voices heard.

Mobile phone applications and SMS were utilized to monitor and evaluate official election results and processes. Looping this information back to Nigerian citizens empowered their action and created an effective and transparent means for free and fair electoral processes.

One application called ReVoDa, is part of the EnoughisEnough (EIE) Nigeria’s RSVP campaign, and connected voters to monitor and evaluate the entire election processes. This is a medium where citizens could report incidents such as ballot box thefts, violence, the late arrival of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officials, police behaviors, and ultimately, the election results. INEC officials are responsible for running the elections, thus they represented the voice of the people to the authorities.

With ReVoDa, EiE Nigeria had the potential to turns the 87,297,789 Nigerians with mobile phones, 43,982,200 with Internet access and 2,985,680 on Facebook into informal election reporters.

ReVoDa allowed voters to report as independent citizen their observations from their respective

polling units across Nigeria, having registered to map their mobile number, name and polling unit number to specific locations. This allowed EiE Nigeria to send relevant information about the electoral process to registered users; and users can view and share reports of electoral processes with one another.

Subsequent to their connectivity, users could choose from the ReVoDa Mobile App or connect via regular SMS, the latter seems to a more popular alternative. Users would create a profile, enter their Polling Unit Code and Name and are then registered on the EiE Nigeria network.

A week prior to the polls opening, ReVoDa, was downloaded by over 7,700 people. Building on the reports received on April 9 for the National Assembly elections, they saw 466 new incident reports from ReVoDa users across 35 of 37 states – compared with 27 states the week before.

Report map of final election results

A similar program called ReclaimNaija has corresponding aims, but provides deliverable reports directly to the

corresponding electoral bodies.

ReclaimNaija uses FrontlineSMS to receive and send text messages reports, and Ushahidi to visually map the election reports. Alike to ReVoDa, ReclaimNaija makes it possible for citizens to monitor the electoral process and report incidents of electoral fraud.

Unlike ReVoDa though, ReclaimNaija has a direct line of communication with electoral officials. Instead of having a database that merely aggregates information and contains reports, they send the reports directly to INEC. By providing evidence of detrimental electoral processes, it can be combated and corrected.

Femi Taiwo, a member of INITS Limited, a Nigerian company that helped set up the technical side of ReclaimNaija’s monitoring system, says:

On election days, citizens have been frustrated by a number of things; missing names, seeing ballot boxes stuffed or even stolen and other electoral fraud and yet being unable to do anything about this. This time however, is the time to speak out”

ReclaimNaija's map of the final election numbers

ReclaimNaija uses FrontlinSMS or calling dedicated numbers in four major languages (Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Pidgin) as the gateway platforms to placing reports to promote electoral transparency.

Another difference between these two programs is that ReclaimNaija achieved a large amount of participation through voter education forums for community leaders, spread across Nigeria’s 36 states, and the capital Abuja. By engaging community based social networks, they ensured the information got across to large segments of society and has been crucial to RecalimNaija’s monitoring and evaluation.

Public launch of the reclaimnaija.net citizens reporting platform on the 2011 elections

Public launch of the reclaimnaija.net citizens on the 2011 elections

During the January 2011 Voters Registration Exercise, ReclaimNaija received 15,000 reports from the public over two weeks, highlighting the importance to have a election monitoring service to offset problems and expose fraud.

The election registration process proved this; on receiving messages about problems such as lack of registration cards, ReclaimNaija was often able to communicate with the INEC, thus helping improve the efficiency of the registration process.

One message received through ReclaimNaija during the first attempt at the National Assembly election said:

more than half of registered voters here [in my voting station] couldn’t find their names… Is this an attempt to reduce the number of voters in Lagos?

These type of citizen based reports and monitoring systems have become a valuable source of information for the INEC to create an environment for fair and balanced elections. ReclaimNaija collate reports and send directly on to the INEC in real time.

“If the INEC hadn’t seen these reports they would not have known about the level of problems being experienced by Nigerians; there would not have been this kind of proof” says Linda Kamau, an Ushahidi developer was in Nigeria to see the launch of ReclaimNaija system.

Kayode R. Idowu, Chief Press Secretary for the INEC Chairman, responded positively to ReclaimNaija and citizens actively reporting incidents to the Commission, “…through SMS and voice calls on phones, or by emailing. Such reports should reflect useful details such as location, time and action involved in the incident, to enable the Commission respond appropriately”.

Clearly, there is a great power in leveraging the use of ICTs to ensure that Nigerian voices were heard in this past election and streamline the efficiency and safety of the electoral process.

April 21, 2011/by actualize

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