By: Chris Michael, Posted: Nov 3 08

Global

Elections

Elections, mobile phone, sms

From the get-go, mobile phones helped dispersed communities and networks connect faster than ever before - even helped keep languages alive.  Increasingly, they're a multipurpose tool to help organize everything from parties and funerals to mass mobilizations and even overthrow a government. 

As the elections approach here in the States, I'm thinking about my experience in the last few elections as an election monitor and how rapidly mobile phones have changed to help document what's happening at the polls, inform the press, mobilize campaigns and legal observers on cases of disenfranchisement in the moment.  Reports can range from whether polls open on time and if there are enough ballots available, to voter access and evidence of intimidation, so clearly mobile phones are an increasingly valuable tool. 

However, as someone that has been watching the trajectory of how mobile phone-generated video is being shared and circulated online to advance social change, a new development is super exciting (and a bit worrying) - streaming video. My colleague Priscila Neri has a great post that features a few new endeavors here in the US where mobile phones are going past text and calls, and moving to live-streaming video and instant multi-media sharing tools to instantly report what's happening at the polls.  These projects may play a massive role in the collective efforts to enable a more safe, secure election. 

While we have a few days until we see the full fruition of these projects (which you can keep an eye on here), I wanted to just take a few moments to feature some of the blog posts, articles and guides that we have appreciated over the past few years that feature innovative mobile-phone based election monitoring and reporting projects around the globe. 

A few favorites (I'll add to this list, but if you have links you'd like to add here, please email me - yes, we're sorting out the commenting function!)

MobileActive, a global community of strategists, activists and technicians tracking how mobile phones are used for social change, have produced an awesome MobileActive Guide that covers uses of mobile phones in elections, both as a voter registration tool and monitoring tool.  Additionally, the guide outlines how mobile phones have been harnessed to educate voters about candidates' stances on issues and to even fundraise.

Katrin Verclas, MobileActive's Coordinator, blog post Texting It In: Monitoring Elections With Mobile Phones, is a great over post that is anchored in Sierra Leone's election in August where a coalition of over 200 NGOs in the country mobilized mobile-phone ready monitors at 500 of the 6171 polling stations.

Trends and Challenges in Election Monitoring, an article in MIT Press' innovations by Jorrit de Jong for Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, takes a look at some new trends with a case discussion on the National Democratic Institute. 

Nigeria:  Blogs and the Nigerian Elections: Will We Stop Talking About Our Cats And Shoes for One Day?, by Ndesanjo Macha.

Kenya:  Kenya in crisis: a search for citizen cameras..., an overview of the post-election crisis in Kenya by my colleague Sameer Padania.

Lastly, my favorite quote of the hour:  Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated in CNN's Cell phones promise fairer elections in Africa, "with communication and cell phones, this is where it is difficult to cheat in elections now...if you have changed the figures, they will know and you will be caught out."