MobileActive.org

I have been meaning for a while to respond to a paper Rebekah Heacock, a graduate student at Columbia, wrote last year. Hancock describes in Mobile Activism in African Elections (PDF) three recent elections in Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and how mobile technology was used for both crowd-sourced and systematic election monitoring.

She poses that: 

The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa is transforming the political and social landscape of the developing world, empowering people to source and share their own information and to have a greater say in what comes to international attention. This paper compares the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.

The three elections reviewed saw very different uses of mobile technology.  However, Heacock gets it wrong in her conclusions and misses a very important opportunity to distinguish between two very different uses of mobile phones in election monitoring: citizen-generated and crowdsourced ad-hoc election monitoring and information gathering on the one hand, and systyematic, organized monitoring by trained local volunteers according to a strict methodology that is stastically relevant and can predict and verify election results.

Both have inherent but very different values and I wish Heacock had described both the differences and the value, benfits, and uses of either method more accurately and in-depth.

But let's go back to the three elections and how they differeed in the use of mobile technology.  As Hancock describes, in Nigeria, the Network of Election Monitors used a combination of registered volunteers and crowdsourcing to receive reports from polling stations.

Registered NMEM associates in each of Nigeria’s 36 states recruited additional volunteers and forwarded mass reminders about the program on the morning of the elections.  Multiple messages from the same polling site were crosschecked for accuracy, and over 10,000 messages, describing both orderly voting experiences and widespread fraud, were received in all.“

In Kenya, Ushahidi, a mash-up map, ws developed and deployed after the election to crowdsource reports via email, web submission, and SMS about incidences of violence.  According to Heacock,

Over 200 incidents were reported, then verified through non-governmental organizations and posted to an interactive calendar and map. Mobile phone-based crowdsourcing also went beyond Ushahidi: several of Kenya’s bloggers allowed readers to comment on their posts via SMS, and the BBC received nearly 4000 text messages from Kenyans after asking for updates on the situation. Local media also used mobile technology to conduct surveys on campaign issues, broadcasting poll questions on television and radio and encouraging listeners to respond via SMS.

Lastly, Heacock notess the election in Sierra Leone where mobile phones were used for systematic election monitoring by a local coalition of NGOs.  Similar to election monitoring in Ghana about which I wrote about extensively last fall, the election in Sierra Leone followed a rigorous protocol to monitor the election process.

In a recent  article in Innovations, "SMS As a Tool in Election Observation," Ian Schuler of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), discusses how, when, and why SMS has been used in election monitoring.  

Schuler describes the methods used by NEW in Sierra Leone:

NEW’s efforts were aided by an innovative text-message reporting method. Observers used a series of carefully constructed codes to send short message system (SMS) messages to one of seven phones connected to a computer by USB cables at NEW headquarters. NEW observers could transmit complex information about the election, from minor procedural infractions to serious flaws. The computer then interpreted the codes and stored the information in a database, which included reports that facilitated rapid analysis ofthe data...NEW’s SMS rapid-reporting system enabled it to make timely and detailed reports that helped to instill confidence in the process and contributed to the peaceful transition to a new administration.

Similarly, in Ghana I worked with the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers, and wrote about the monitorin there:

Each of the 4,000 trained observers-mostly members of the 34-organization strong CODEO coalition--are deployed all over Ghana are using their phones to report on incidences at the polls and how well the polls are conducted, using a coded checklist.  As we have reported before, systematic SMS reporting by trained local citizen observers about how well an election is conducted can prevent rumors, and is an independent and reliable indicator about the quality of the election process.  

1,000 of the observers are also conducting 'Parallel Vote Tabulation', a methodology that independently verifies the accuracy of the official vote count at the end of election day.  As the name suggests, the observers are watching as the votes are counted at the randomly selected polling stations where they are deployed before ballots are collated and transported. This allows observers to get as close as possible to an actual count.  The vote tabulation for each candidate and party are then immediately transmitted by the observer via SMS to the CODEO Observation Center to be tabulated and compared with the official results.  

Since these 1,000 polling stations constitute a representative sample of the more than 22,000 polling stations in Ghana, a well-conducted parallel vote tabulation provides a very reliable indicator as to whether the total official vote count announcements are accurate.

An observer from the EU noted that the system CODEO developed was by far 'the most impressive' election observation system using mobile tech that he had seen.  And the news so far from the Rapid Response Observers is encouraging: There have been few incidence and voting is going largely smoothly.   As many people will tell you on the street: "We are voting for Mama Ghana."

The methods deployed by Ushahidi and in Nigeria versus the election monitoring conducted by NEW and CODEO on Sierra Leone and Ghana, respectively, were very different and it would be very useful to delineate much more clearly when crowdsourcing information for greater participation in elections is in order, and when methodical election monitoring with trained volunteers according to a strict methodology is useful and appropriate. Both methods have their value. 

However, Heacock concludes wrongly and without backing up her assertion, that 

By allowing voters to become reporters and evaluators In Nigeria and Sierra Leone, mobile phones encouraged citizen participation and a greater sense of ownership in the political process.  Crowdsourced information proved to be more comprehensive and more timely than reports gathered through traditional methods; it was also reasonably accurate, due to the
verification processes each system had in place.  Mobile monitoring is too informal to replace international monitoring missions, but the ability of cell-phone equipped observers to collect and disseminate accurate election results to the public quickly and cheaply helped ease tensions that may have otherwise lead to conflict.

She does not explain why 'crowdsourced informtion' is more comprehensive (especially puzzing since Sierra Leone's observation mission was not at all crowd-sourced) and she misunderstands mbile monitoring entirely.  She also is misguided when she notes that "mobile monitoring is too informal to replace international monitoring missions" -- a rather dubious assertion given, for example, the thousands of local trained volunteer monitors that were deployed in Ghana -- nurses, workers, teachers, and others in the CODEO coalition who were far more effective with their method than the few international monitors observing. 

There are a few notable mistakes in Heacock's paper as well. The first time mobiles were used in election monitoring was actually not in 2007 in Africa but in Indonesia in 2005 and in Palestine in 2006, as well as in Montenegro.  As we described elsewhere,

The story starts in Montenegro, a small country in the former Yugoslavia. On May 21, 2006 the country saw the first instance of volunteer monitors using SMS, also known as text messaging, as their main election reporting tool. A Montenegrin NGO, the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), with technical assistance from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in the United States, was the first organization in the world to use text messaging to meet all election day reporting requirements. 

We invite both Heacock and Ian Schuler, as a practitioner and expert in the field of election monitoring to respond and explain when and how crowscourcing versus systematic election observation is appropriate to advance the understanding and use of mobiles in making elections more accountable, fair, and participatory in countries around the world.