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Mobile ActivismIn African Elections
 A Comparative Case Study
Rebekah Heacock rh2418@columbia.edu
DigiActive Research Series, March 2009
 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
 
Introduction
 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 tohave a greater say in what comes to international attention. The purpose of this research is tocompare the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria,Sierra Leone and Kenya.In Nigeria’s April 2007 presidential election, a local civil society organization used free softwareto collect over 10,000 text message reports from voters around the country, boosting citizenparticipation in a political process many Nigerians doubted. In Sierra Leone’s August-September2007 elections, trained local monitors used mobile phones to collect data from designated polling sites, enabling the independent National Election Watch to compile and release an accurate,comprehensive analysis of the election almost two weeks before the official report. And inKenya’s December 2007 election, a group of local digital activists developed and implemented acitizen reporting platform to allow Kenyans to report and track post-election violence during amonth-long media blackout, collecting and publishing a comprehensive account of riots,displacement and human rights abuses that serves as one of the best available records of thecrisis.
NIGERIA: APRIL 2007
 The April 2007 Nigerian presidential elections were the first time that mobile phones were usedformally to monitor an African election. They also marked the first democratic transfer of power since the country’s independence in 1960 (Ibrahim 2007, online). Though the NigerianSenate had rejected an attempt by the incumbent president to amend the constitution to allow him to seek a third term, voters still expressed worries that the elections would be “just aprocedure,” citing Nigeria’s history of electoral fraud (Timberg 2006a, online). The months priorto the election were marked by violence that claimed the lives of over 70 Nigerians, and theNigerian police ordered 40,000 automatic weapons in anticipation of election-related riots(Human Rights Watch 2007, online; Miller 2007, online).  Two months before the elections, the Human Emancipation Lead Project (HELP) Foundation, anon-profit group of Nigerian young professionals, began looking for ways to increase citizenparticipation in the electoral process. Their search took them to Ken Banks, founder of FrontlineSMS (www.frontlinesms.com). Originally developed to connect African national parksto local communities, FrontlineSMS lets anyone with a computer and a mobile phone use text
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messages to interact with large groups of people. HELP asked Banks to help them devise anSMS-based crowdsourcing system to monitor the upcoming elections, which they implementedunder the newly created Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) (Banks 2007, online). NMEM had two main goals: to bolster official electionmonitoring efforts, which are often limited by time andgeography, and to engage Nigerian citizens in the politicalprocess as evaluators as well as voters. After a successful testrun during the April 14 state government elections, NMEMopened the system to volunteers nationwide for thepresidential election on April 21. Registered NMEMassociates in each of Nigeria’s 36 states recruited additional volunteers and forwarded mass reminders about theprogram on the morning of the elections. Multiplemessages from the same polling site were crosschecked foraccuracy, and over 10,000 messages, describing both orderly  voting experiences and widespread fraud, were received inall. NMEM concluded that, despite some polling places where voting ran smoothly, the elections were marked by annumber of violations of electoral policy, an assessment that wasechoed by both domestic and international observers (NMEM 2007, online). Two days after the elections, as the results were still being disputed by a group of Nigerianjudges charged with determining whether the outcome of the election would stand, NMEMpolled all those who had participated in the SMS monitoring system, asking whether they thought the election should be re-held (Connors 2008, online). Eighty percent of respondents voted to accept the results, a decision that was eventually upheld by the Nigerian court (NMEM2007, online). 
SIERRA LEONE: AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2007
Sierra Leone’s 2007 presidential elections were the second to take place in the country since theend of a decades-long civil war (S Leone 2007, online). Election preparations began almostimmediately after the 2005 completion of the UN peacekeeping mission, and the newly restructured National Electoral Commission succeeded in registering 2.6 million voters, just over90% of the country’s eligible population (Ohman 2008, online). The BBC reported scattered actsof politically motivated violence and several election-related arrests in the months preceding the
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SAMPLE TEXT MESSAGESFROM THE NMEM SYSTEM
“…There is a huge irregularityof voting at Gwande Karfaward. In Bokkos LGC. TAKE NOTE….”“I want to commend the effortsof INEC and for making thiselection come to pass in theface of every challenge.”"EVERYWHERE IS CALMVOTING IS ON.MOVEMENT ISRESTRICTED FOR EFFECTIVENESS OF THEELECTION PROCESS."
(Network of Mobile ElectionMonitors 2007, online)
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