Mobile phones and African elections

The folks at DigiActive, an excellent resource for tracking the spread of digital activism around the globe, have just released a brief study on the role that mobile phones have played in three recent African elections (Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya), with a particular focus on their monitoring potential.  The report’s conclusions are predictably optimistic, ...

The folks at DigiActive, an excellent resource for tracking the spread of digital activism around the globe, have just released a brief study

The folks at DigiActive, an excellent resource for tracking the spread of digital activism around the globe, have just released a brief study

on the role that mobile phones have played in three recent African elections (Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya), with a particular focus on their monitoring potential.  The report’s conclusions are predictably optimistic, stressing the mobile technology’s role in encouraging citizen participation and a greater sense of ownership in the political process:

Crowdsourced  information proved to  be more  comprehensive and more  timely  than reports  gathered  through  traditional  methods;  it  was  also  reasonably  accurate,  due  to  the verification processes  each system  had  in  place.   Mobile monitoring  is  too  informal  to  replace international monitoring  missions, but  the  ability  of  cell-phone  equipped  observers  to  collect and disseminate accurate election results  to  the public quickly  and cheaply helped ease tensions that may have  otherwise  lead  to conflict.

One of the main reasons why mobile technology played such a crucial role in all three countries  has been a somewhat relaxed attitude towards mobile technology on behalf of the incumbent governments (who, perhaps, were still unaware of the more subversive uses of text messaging exploited by technologies like FrontlineSMS). The DigiActive report sounds a cautious note here, noting that authorities could eventually catch up with the activists:

…After the Kenyan election authorities considered both shutting down mobile phone communications and requiring users  to  register  their  phones  with  a  central  database  (Cellular  News  2008,  online). Infrastructure-related network outages caused difficulties  in Sierra Leone,  negating the  real-time quality  of  mobile  phone  monitoring  that  is  its  greatest  asset  (Verclas  2007,  online);  a government-enforced  outage would  similarly prevent mobile monitors  from  doing  their work.  Furthermore,  the  potential  exists  for  governments  to  utilize  seemingly  appropriate  security measures as steps toward surveillance and censorship, a serious concern in countries that already lack government transparency.

 Photo by D’Arcy Norman/Flickr

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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