Citizen Election Monitoring: Demonstrated Accountability

NDI’s work with citizen election monitoring groups provides an illustrative example of combining new technologies, effective methodologies and strong organizations to create positive political outcomes. A common approach to citizen election monitoring (details here) involves deploying trained election observers with their mobile phones to a representative sample of polling stations around a country on Election Day trained to identify election irregularities or record observations and results.

The observers transfer information from paper reporting forms to a centralized national database using SMS or voice messages. The information is aggregated and analyzed by organization leaders to evaluate the overall quality of the process or accuracy of the election result and shared with the public.

This approach is a way to collect substantial evidence to detect and deter fraud, while building public trust in the process and adding legitimacy to the election if things go well. These uses of new media tools and related election activities have been very effective. Due to the rapid and accurate reporting provided by the tools and data-driven analysis this methodology has professionalized the way civic groups use quantitative election information in “real time” around elections, and has been central to the ability of NDI partners to give the public a non-partisan view on the quality of the election process in their country.

In many cases we believe our partners have made contributions that have prevented post-election related violence or identified and raised important concerns with the electoral process that have led to more democratic and peaceful outcomes. The field of domestic election monitoring has improved significantly in the last several years partly due to improved methods and approaches, enabled by the new technologies and replicated due to the role of international organizations.

The 2008 Zimbabwe elections provide a good example of a successful citizen election monitoring program.