Crowdsourcing, defined by the Merriam
Webster online dictionary as “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas,
or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and
especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or
suppliers,” can be a valuable tool during elections.
As digital technologies reshape electoral processes
around the world, electoral observation is also being transformed digitally,
through crowdsourced monitoring. Individual citizens are now able to use social
media, mobile apps, and dedicated websites to observe and report on violence
and intimidation, fraudulent voting activities, miscounts, and erroneous voter
registration lists. Potentially, an entire population can act as monitors,
expanding the capacity of national and international observers.
Youth populations tend to be technologically literate,
and in possession of mobile phones, meaning they are well placed to monitor
election activities and report cases of violence instantly.
EMBs could consider establishing online platforms for
elections monitoring and providing training for youth and CSOs to use new tools
in ways that can contribute to the prevention of conflicts and enable real-time
exchanges of information on all parts of electoral processes. Social media
should be used to supplement rather than replace other traditional tools of
information.
See Citizen Electoral Observation (ACE
Topic Area)
Around the world, open-source technology platforms and
apps, such as Ushahidi[i],
ReVoDa[ii],
Get Aggie[iii],
the Carter Center’s ELMO (Election Monitoring)[iv], International
IDEA’s Electoral Risk Management Tool (ERMTool)[v] and mass text messaging services like Clickatell[vi] and
FrontlineSMS[vii]
are being used by EMBs and CSOs to monitor elections and to manage automated
communications and data.
Example: In the 2016 US election, the crowdsourcing technology
platform Ushahidi was used to monitor election issues in a “citizen-led”
effort. US citizens were able to report election issues via Twitter, SMS,
webform and email. Vetting teams
verified information and then published it online. The initiative was described
as complementing the work of other election monitoring organizations. Ushahidi
was developed in Kenya to monitor, report, and map violence in the post-2008
election.
Example: Enough is Enough (EiE) is a non-partisan network in
Nigeria that encourages good governance and accountability through active
citizenship. The RSVP (Register, Select, Vote not fight, Protect) program
focuses on young Nigerians (18 to 35 years) with access to technology. In 2015,
EiE used the mobile phone app ReVoDa to enable Nigerians to report as citizen
observers from polling units across Nigeria.
Link to ACE Consolidated Reply: Popularizing
Election Observation Among 2010 Philippine Elections
Link to ACE Electoral Materials: Participation of
Youth in Elections (Cambodia)
[vii] https://www.frontlinesms.com/
