While at the polls on November 4, 2008, Virginia H. grew suspicious. She could see younger voters around her being turned away before receiving ballots, despite the fact that their names were on the voter roll. In the past, she might have shared the news with friends or perhaps a local reporter. That day, though, she tweeted her concerns with the hashtag #EPOH, allowing monitors from the nonpartisan Election Protection commission to follow up with local election officials. Check out a video about the project here.
Voters in Afghanistan's 2005 elections. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jacob Caldwell from Wikimedia Commons.
The role of Twitter as a content-provider and a window into the hearts and minds of politicians has already been covered on this blog. But, according to media reports, another major political use for Twitter (and, more broadly, text messaging) across the world has been to help ensure fairness and transparency in national elections.
In Burundi, for example, residents sent text messages using FrontlineSMS throughout their election day, reporting any incidents of violence or coercion and confirming peace where possible. In Kenya’s election last year, people similarly used a combination of text messaging and Twitter to track results. The tactics have even been employed in various Middle Eastern elections.
When I first encountered these examples, I thought of them as proof of the power of social media and messaging when employed towards serious ends. For the first time, I, as an unaffiliated observer halfway around the world, could plot the progress of poll reports over the course of a given day. I could follow certain civilians, retweet important tidbits, and reply directly to the messenger. I thought of it as novel! Empowering! The wave of the future!
…until I read this blog post, and realized maybe I’m just contributing to excessive hype. The post’s authors, like many skeptics of citizen journalism tactics that we’ve examined in past weeks, say that these actions can indeed contribute to qualitative data and allow citizens to feel like a part of the process. They can also sometimes deter wrongdoers because of the threat of anonymous feedback. But they are no substitute for trained professionals who have been taught how to properly observe elections over the course of the past 20 years.
Their argument becomes even more convincing when we examine the numbers. In Sudan, for example, a Vote Monitor meant for amateurs and supported by the US State Department received around 300-500 messages over the course of the elections. The official election monitoring coalitions, on the other hand, had more than 4,300 trained observers on the ground able to complete over 13,500 reports. For all of the applause around social media tools as democratic enablers, why aren’t more people taking a look at this data and toning down the hubris? Instead, headlines run proclaiming victory via 140-characters: “How Twitter Saved Kenya’s Elections,” reads one example. Really? That’s the only reason those elections turned out okay?
Okay, I hear you. These tools are cool. Amazing, even, in their potential. I’m not trying to deny that — in fact, I am a huge proponent of #hashtag #story #propulsion. But perhaps that’s all it is right now: the spreading of news and the unifying of stories. It’s not the fact checker or the trained professional, at least not in the vast majority of the cases. Not yet. And the only way we might get there as social media users is to acknowledge where we fall short and to combine our efforts with those of real, live experts.
Our next major election is just a little over a year away. And here’s the challenge: @millenials: without being overconfident, how can you best use the strengths of these media tools to add to the work of @yourelders?
#thechoiceisyours.
Great post. While new technologies certainly revolutionize human interaction, I agree that in cases like these we often overstate the effect it has on the ground. I have friends who strongly believe that social media will transform the problems of the developing world. During a summer I spent in Uganda, however, it became clear to me that technology can only go so far, and cannot fill in for productive legislative action. For example, I constantly received text messages on my Ugandan phone from men and women in Gulu and Apac, districts which had been destroyed by the war and were experiencing a crippling drought. They had somehow figured out that a Westerner owned my number and constantly texted me desperate pleas for clean water and medicine. So while they all owned cellphones from China, they lacked food, water, medicine, infrastructure, schools, etc. Of course it’s revolutionary that the farmers could tell me and others of their suffering, but many many people died that summer because of a corrupt and inefficient government couldn’t mobilize resources to alleviate their plight(I spent the summer working in the parliament, and boy was it both these things). Technologies are exciting, and will hopefully help alleviate suffering around the world. But, it is evident that technology must be accompanied productive legislative decisions in order to better the living conditions in the developing world.
Social media outlets like Twitter aren’t substitutions for professional election monitoring, but when it comes down to it, I don’t think they realistically purport to be either. To answer your question about the best use of social media’s strengths, I would say that connectivity. By supplementing standard monitoring for election tampering and intimidation, these outlets better allow professionals to pursue leads to which they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily have access. Adding a simple hashtag to a Twitter post is far easier than doing the work it would take to get a hold of the right authorities in a case like the one you mentioned at the top of your post. Realistically speaking, I don’t even believe that it’s a question of whether you choose to phone it in or tweet it; instead, the choice seems more like whether to tweet or to not bother doing anything at all.
For election monitoring to be most effective, citizens need to be vigilant. As far as I can tell, this seems to be the most accessible way of taking on such responsibility.
I agree with Arjun above. Election monitoring should be left to election monitors. You cannot rely on new media alone to bring you free and fair elections, especially not in the developing world. I was actually in Kenya during the referendum and I can tell you from inductive reasoning alone that Twitter didn’t save anything… because nobody has Twitter. Kenyans would at most post Facebook status preaching/praying for a peaceful election that would avoid the violence of 2008, but did not do the watching that election monitors were supposed to do. If the Kenya saw no violence in August, it was because of the careful efforts of Kenyan policymakers and citizens, not the fluttering of a blue bird.
I tend to agree with both Alf and Arjun. Election monitoring should be left up to trained officials. Relying on citizens to police and report any election procedural infractions is presumptuous on the part of the government, and simply lacks reliability.
That said, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites should be used to compliment any reports of election malfeasance. At very least, any updates on social media sites could be used to indicate potential foul play during foreign elections. Tweets and status updates could be used a notification tool to call in the authorities when election results have been tampered with or citizens unjustly coerced. Relying on Tweets and status updates as a primary defense against election malfeasance, however, places a burden too great on the part of citizens.
The problem is that election monitoring itself is an imperfect process. I was a part of a YIRA election monitoring trip to Haiti last fall, and what I saw was unsettling. My team and I drove around Port-au-Prince to document the ongoing elections, but observers from OAS were nowhere to be found. We heard from our local contacts that the threat of violence had forced observers to stay away from slum areas like Cite Soleil, which incidentally housed the largest electorate. These poor, chaotic tent cities had essentially no international monitors holding them accountable, and the charges of corruption are still echoing today. These charges came from the freelance journalists, who Tweeted their findings and shared them with the international media – and subsequently led to candidate Jude Celestin’s withdrawal from the race.
In light of this, I think it’s important to consider new media tools as a compliment and not as a substitute for physical election monitors. For such an imperfect process, it is always better to have extra eyes watching, recording, and relaying the information to the rest of the world – the new technologies can only enhance what we can do as people.
I think its important to understand social media sites and tools as facilitators rather than the actors in this process. I agree with Arjun’s point about the decision between making a phone call and sending in a tweet. That appears not to be the issue at hand. In fact, NGO’s, I think, take note of this in their appeals to citizens. These groups understand that the likelihood of someone calling in a tip is much less likely than someone tweeting it, since social media tools allow the individual to act in a setting that has a low degree of interpersonal access and where your twitter name is all people can know.
This is great.
The problem arises in a post-failed-bomber-NYC-Times Square-mentality when people suspicious of election fraud call in resources which eventually are seen to be unnecessary as the activity in question was not, in fact, fraudulent.
In such a case, professional resources are called away and cost is incurred but nothing is ultimately accomplished.
This is a risk in most vigilante endeavors, but the more dangerous problem is when such red herring tweets dilute the reliable ones and panic overrules experience.
There’s no easy way to deal with that.