How to save votes

By M.D.

COULD smartphones help reduce electoral fraud in Africa and in other regions? At a recent forum hosted by the Brookings Institution on the ways that wireless technologies are affecting politics in various countries, Clark Gibson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego (USCD), presented findings from experiments in Afghanistan and Uganda which suggest that they can. Local researchers were deployed to polling stations armed with digital cameras and smartphones to take photographs of the publicly posted election tallies. The research found that this alone can cut electoral fraud by up to 60%.

The experiment was first developed during the 2010 Afghan elections by James Long and Michael Callen, then UCSD graduate students, with funding from the Development Innovation Ventures section at the United States Agency for International Development. To test the idea that photographic "quick-counts" of election results can reduce ballot rigging the team split a sample of 471 polling stations in Afghanistan into a "treatment" group and a "control" group. The polling stations in the treatment group were sent letters announcing that a researcher would visit shortly after the election to take a digital photograph of the tallies; the polling stations in the control group received no such prior warning. The research concluded that as a result electoral rigging was cut by 25% in the polling stations in the treatment group and the theft of ballot boxes and other election materials was reduced by 60%.