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Lessons in Social Election Monitoring

Published: 03 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Since 2011, our research group, along with numerous local partners, has been building a platform and methodology for monitoring elections using social media. Historically, election monitoring has traditionally been the domain of trained monitors provided by international monitoring groups. But monitoring by domestic groups with fewer resources has been a growing phenomenon, supported in part by the availability of inexpensive digital technologies such as SMS. Social media represents a further, exciting step in this trend. We describe our five years of experience in this endeavor and report a series of key lessons learned. These lessons touch on issues such as source types and curation, collaboration with other election-related groups, human vs. automated analysis, varying stakeholder needs, and the value of falsification. We also share our vision for the next five years of this research.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)"We're Not in That Circle of Misinformation": Understanding Community-Based Trusted Messengers Through Cultural Code-SwitchingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374298:CSCW1(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2017)Comparative use of web form, SMS, and chatbot in Social Election monitoring of the Dominican 2016 General ElectionProceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3136560.3136599(1-5)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2017

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
ICTD '16: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
June 2016
427 pages
ISBN:9781450343060
DOI:10.1145/2909609
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

In-Cooperation

  • Google Inc.
  • Microsoft: Microsoft
  • University of Michigan: University of Michigan

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 June 2016

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Author Tags

  1. ICT4D
  2. civic participation
  3. civic technology
  4. democracy
  5. election monitoring
  6. lessons learned
  7. social media

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ICTD '16

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Overall Acceptance Rate 22 of 116 submissions, 19%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)"We're Not in That Circle of Misinformation": Understanding Community-Based Trusted Messengers Through Cultural Code-SwitchingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374298:CSCW1(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2017)Comparative use of web form, SMS, and chatbot in Social Election monitoring of the Dominican 2016 General ElectionProceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3136560.3136599(1-5)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2017

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