The Declaration of Global Principles calls for citizen
election observation organizations to foster cooperation among themselves when
gathering and evaluating information on the various aspects of an election
process. The Declaration states that citizen organizations should “seek to
achieve the highest degree of cooperation and potentials for coordination that
are appropriate to the national circumstances…”[i]
The Declaration adds that cooperating organizations should also be
non-partisan, have endorsed the Declaration and implement it “in apparent good
faith and manner.[ii]”
Cooperation among non-partisan citizen observer organizations or groups could
make for a comprehensive and systematic data collection process. Freedom to
associate with other organizations, both domestic and international, is a
necessary precondition for this to occur.[iii]
The proximity of citizen groups to one another, their
overlapping objectives and the need to pool limited resources together makes it
relatively easy for citizen observer groups to collaborate. While there have
been instances of such collaboration, cooperation among citizen election
observation organizations has, however, not always occurred when needed. Increased
use of digital technology in election administration and observation efforts
has sometimes made cooperation difficult. A key dynamic here is the often
inconsistency or interoperability of the technology-based tools used by
different observer groups. For example, in the 2010 Philippine national
elections, civil society organizations such as the National Citizens’ Movement
for Free Elections (NAMFREL), which had experience and specialized knowledge in
election observation, failed to coordinate with information technology-focused
organizations such as Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG),
which focused on maintaining the integrity of the automatic voting systems. In
this case, civil society organizations were unable to adapt their methodologies
to accommodate new technologies in time for the elections, while
technology-focused organizations did not have the requisite experience to effectively
monitor the electoral process.[iv]
[i]
Declaration of Global Principles for Non-Partisan Election Observation and
Monitoring By Citizen Organizations, art. 9, 2012
[ii]
Declaration of Global Principles for Non-Partisan Election Observation and
Monitoring By Citizen Organizations, art. 21, 2012
[iii]
Declaration of Global Principles for Non-Partisan Election Observation and
Monitoring By Citizen Organizations, art. 18, 2012
[iv]
NDI, Nonpartisan Citizen Oversight of Elections in the Philippines.
https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/examples/citizen-oversight-of-elections-philippines
