Mobile app helps bring election monitoring into real-time
Twenty-eight years ago, countries across Europe gathered in Denmark to determine and agree on a path towards fair, open election monitoring.
Of the 37 countries that signed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) 1990 Copenhagen document, only five have reached full compliance. One of these countries — Romania — has launched a new app for real-time vote monitoring at polls through Code for Romania. The technology offers an exciting opportunity to bring real-time poll monitoring to countries across the world, aiding the efforts of human rights organizations and individual citizens to report irregularities on voting day.
Despite compliance, voting in Romania is still not perfect — small, rural villages have been known to see a 100% voter turnout in elections, sometimes including residents that have been dead for years.
Olivia Vereha, the co-founder and chief of operations at Code for Romania said that Monitorizare Vot, the mobile app that they have developed, was created to solve a number of problems that civil society was facing while observing polls in Romanian elections. In 2015, Code for Romania debuted the new technology, putting their mobile app in the hands of 562 election reporters across 1,346 polling stations, collecting a total of 1,322 voting irregularities.
Previously, human rights groups monitoring elections would get volunteers to monitor elections, gather forms from these observers, and file reports based on what they had heard from their observers. “It was very 1992,” Vereha said.
So how does Monitorizare Vot work?
Monitorizare Vot, translated, is simply Vote Monitoring. Vereha says there are three main components: the mobile app to be used by election monitors, a citizen’s poll to be used by everyday Romanians as they vote in-country or abroad, and the reporting function, monitored mostly by the civil society partners who report on the findings of poll monitors.
The mobile app aimed at aiding election observers from civil society organizations has an easy-to-use, straight forward design. To verify that they’re actual members of a civil society organization, observers log in with their mobile phone number and sent an SMS code to verify their identity.
Vereha said that this is meant to keep their data clean and free from government interference. “We need to make sure political parties can’t highjack this process. Romania is on its third government in just two years, and civil society is angry and pointing fingers. At Code for Romania, we’re stepping out of that circle and trying to remain neutral, not controversial,” Vereha said.
Once logged into the app, poll observers can fill in the voting station number, the name of the county, and other identifying information.
“One reporter may visit ten to fifteen polling stations in one day, and we need to differentiate [which reports are coming from which polling stations],” Vereha said. Monitorizare Vot asks additional questions like the gender of the polling station manager and the length of time that the observer spent in the polling station. Much of the app is based on OSCE’s election monitoring standardized forms, meaning they’re easy to recognize for any experienced election observer.
Monitorizare Vot is also aimed at helping everyday Romanians report irregularities that they see at the polls, whether they’re voting in their hometown or from abroad. Romania has a large diaspora across Europe and until 2015, those voters were required to vote in person at a consulate, embassy, or other appointed polling place. Using the form on the homepage of the Monitorizare Vot website, any Romanian citizen can now report what they see as they cast their vote.
Not everyone knows what, exactly, constitutes a voting irregularity; in order to cut back on the amount of false reports, the app is built to offer observers and voters information about just what is and isn’t allowed at a polling station as well. “We give observers lots of information so they don’t have to call the NGOs to clarify the rules,” Vereha said. The same information helps keep false reports out of the hands of the police who are often ill-equipped to handle election issues.
Monitorizare Vot fills a surprisingly large technological void in the election monitoring world.
Because of the lack of technical infrastructure in many countries that actively monitor their polls, a debate still exists about just how helpful mobile apps can be in the field, with many existing technologies only using SMS. Romania, however, leads the world in Internet usage and availability. According to a poll by USA-based cloud service provider Akamai in 2016, Romanian Internet is the fastest in the world — and thanks to a proliferation of micro-ISP providers, incredibly affordable and available almost everywhere.
As Vereha said, “More Romanians have smart phones than toilets in their home.” And, Vereha added, many of the best features of the apps were built around technological concerns: the app is light so it won’t drain a mobile phone battery, can be used offline in the absence of Internet or data service, and the log-in feature should keep political parties out.
The third function of the Monitorizare Vot app is the stats area where reports from observers and citizens are compiled into a Twitter-like feed of information. Here, members of the media and civil society alike can see what areas had the most reports, or which had the least. The data can be visualized and shared with the media in an easy to read format, lessening the burden of civil society to share information with others who are eager to learn what happened on voting day.
With one good election in the books at home, Code for Romania is beginning to scale their technology to other countries.
Moldova is an easy place to start; with a parliamentarian election this November and the same official language, Moldova has begun building out their own version of Monitorizare Vot with questions geared towards their current election law.
Code for Poland has also begun exploring the implementation of Monitorizare Vot for upcoming local elections in Warsaw. Karol Bijos with Fundacja Odpowiedzialna, a political accountability NGO partnering with Code for Poland, said this will be the first time non-partisan Polish organizations will be able to observe elections in Polish history.
“One very important feature of this app is that it has been tested. We have seen our Romanian partners use it and it worked very well, so we’re thinking we can try to implement it in the Polish reality” Bijos said.
Bijos, who has also observed Russian presidential elections via video with the Political Accountability Foundation, said the amendment passed this year has been a long-time goal of election monitors in Poland. Previously, only international human rights organizations and party proxies, or representatives of political parties, were allowed to monitor polls. By allowing their own human rights organizations to monitor the polls, Poland is taking a big step towards compliance with the OSCE document signed in Copenhagen years ago in 1990 — and technology now offers them the chance to make it easier than ever.
“We’re not doing this election observation with the thesis that the election will be falsified. We’re not looking for something wrong, we’re observing. We’d be happy to say that the elections were great! I dream about telling you one day that our elections were great. It’s democracy in our country that we’re trying to improve.”
