SwiftCount Your Blessings

I've joined my NDItech colleague Jared Ford on the ground in Abuja, Nigeria for the #biggestPVTever. We're working with Project Swift Count (@swiftcount), a coalition representing women, religious lawyers, and other civil society groups. It's pretty exciting - this series of elections (not one! not two! but three in a row!) are a major milestone in this massive, chaotic, confusing, colorful, diverse country of 150,000,000. It's the biggest population in Africa in a nation about twice the size of California with a historically tense relationship between a largely Muslim North and Christian South. There are some logistical challenges to running an election in these circumstances. INEC, the Independent National Election Commission, delayed the first round of elections by a week at the last minute. Actually, considerably past the last minute - our observers were already at their stations with increasingly fretful reports rolling in as time rolled by and the polling places remained shuttered. INEC is clearly trying to get it right, and it paid off today. This morning the polls opened as expected. The monitoring mission went great; we've had astonishing work from our observers around the country. Over 98% of them have reported in during each of three separate windows. I'm astonished. I don't think you could get 98% of most groups to participate in free beer day at Disneyland. As Jared mentioned, folks from NDI and our partners at Project Swift Count have been working hard on this project for a long time. As a matter of fact, Jared was out here back in July of last year when we first started putting together the SMS reports processing system. The numbers involved are staggering - in the later two elections, there will be 8000 observers across the country covering every single local government area in the nation. The last, for powerful state governors, will have 6 concurrent PVTs - parallel vote tabulations* - going on the same day. The monitors out in the field today were highly experienced; most of them have been working with Project Swift Count since January. In that time they've reported on voter registration, run simulations, had one aborted real election, another training last Thursday, and the first big show today. Practice makes perfect, as Jared observed, and 98% is probably about as close as you can get in this world. The next elections are going to be even harder, but the team's ready. *I don't know that we've explained PVTs before. They are particularly cool math-heavy election monitoring missions where... well, that'll have to be a post for another time.