Free and Easy Election Data Entry the Google Way

On Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Liberians headed to the polls for the first national referendum in 25 years.
The referendum asked citizens to cast their votes on four constitutional amendments.  As Liberians voted on these propositions under the watchful eye of the ECC, NDI’s partner observer group, the NDItech team rolled out a free, easy new way of gathering monitor reports: Google Forms.

One of our goals is always to find technology that’s sustainable. While that word is an overused bit of development jargon, the concept is key - the people with whom you’re working should be able to manage the systems you create in case your whole organization gets eaten by sharktopi or, more likely, your program comes to an end. The big components of this are cost (can the users afford to keep it running?) and capability (do they understand how to fix, tweak, and administer it?) Google is great on both counts.

As with other elections, the ECC’s observers were both noting standard procedures such as opening time or police presence and also any significant intimidation, cheating, illegal voting, or ballot-box stealing. The latter are called “critical incidents” and are phoned into the data center as soon as they occur since they represent a major disruption in the conduct of the polls at that location.

Back at the data center incoming calls about incident reports were recorded not on paper (slow), in Excel (keying error-prone) or via a specialized web app (expensive) but rather via a simple Google form that closely matched the paper in observers’ hands. It took perhaps an hour to set up and cost us precisely nothing. The forms aren’t perfect; they can’t do sophisticated data validation, and once information saves to the spreadsheet it can’t be re-edited easily.

This new approach reflects NDI’s recent migration to Google Apps and our team's efforts to leverage the benefits of these tools. After relatively easy data entry the information drops, trap-door style, straight into a Google spreadsheet. From there you can turn to old friends from Excel for analysis.  We created pivot tables and dynamic graphs to summarize different metrics; these tables are linked to the spreadsheet and thus automatically updated as data is entered. One table, for example, showed a breakdown of the type of incident by county.

The inherently multi-user nature of Google Docs also meant that a number of people could do data entry concurrently, and that management back at Coalition HQ and in DC could watch in real time as the information rolled in - and the analysis automatically updated itself. Fun stuff.

With the data in and live rough cut analysis at their fingertips, the ECC was in a good place to proceed with their deeper consideration of the data and prepping a statement to share with the Liberian people. After having created these forms and analysis tools, we’ll be ready to reuse them even faster in the future.

Image courtesty of Brittany Danisch.