Election monitoring technology is changing - and now is the time to ensure those changes are for the better.
For the last 14 years, Frontline has helped support election monitors communicate using messaging. When you absolutely need to reach everyone, there’s simply no substitute for SMS. And, while there are differences in how election monitors work between contexts, the goals and ultimate structure of the work has been relatively similar. And, so while the networks of actors involved often varies, the ultimate services and information reporting requirements are usually pretty similar.
In other words, while the news often talks about the impact of technology on elections, the technology for international election monitoring hasn’t seriously changed in quite some time (we are politely ignoring a number of hype-driven terrible ideas - blockchain voting: we’re looking at you). The needs of the National Election Watch in Freetown in August 2007 weren’t that different from the clients we support today.
That, however, is starting to change - driven by two, key developments: ‘digital sovereignty’ and ‘Internet shutdowns’.
Digital Sovereignty While there are a lot of words for it (sovereignty, localisation, residency), an increasing number of countries - for good and bad reasons - want to be able to exert sovereign control over data. That’s especially true of data that has an impact on a country’s political future. That means that, increasingly, election monitors need to be both aware of local laws about their use and transmission of data AND have the technological capability to store data locally (and, in some cases, be able to prove that it hasn’t left the country).
Internet Shutdowns Unfortunately, there are an increasing number of governments that prevent access to the Internet during elections. In addition to proactive Internet shutdowns, many places struggle with rural connectivity, electricity provision, as well as limited Internet use generally. So, whether it’s because of obstacles to Internet access or proactive infrastructure shutdowns, a growing number of election monitoring operations are having to build reporting infrastructure that works offline, at scale, in real-time. More often than not, if there’s any communication infrastructure that’s working, it’s SMS - and so building SMS-based reporting networks for election monitoring is a growing requirement for operations that need to be able to work across a diversity of contexts.
At a high-level, these two trends are broader than election monitoring - they have significant impacts for everything with a digital footprint. And yet - elections are the kind of event that trigger big, charged questions about government powers, often under strain.
For those of us who support election monitors, these trends go beyond the usual requirements of providing resilient, secure, and encrypted communications. They require use to build configurable solutions that give users control over data hosting, data syncing, and platform architecture. In today’s digital market, it’s (perhaps surprisingly) uncommon for (most) products to run locally, and even more uncommon for them to work offline.
And yet, if election monitors are going to be able to take the next big step - they’ll need tools that enable them to architect, configure, and communicate sophisticated, real-time data, while minimising external dependencies.
We’ve been talking about FrontlineLocal for a while - and we’re currently pilot-testing it at scale, in order to ensure it’s ready for the challenges of modern election monitoring. The good news is that the early results are strong, and we’re planning to announce a release date for FrontlineLocal very soon. In even better news, we’re also working on a product that will address a key gap in the market, and make it easier to manage secure, offline communications - more on that soon.
The bad news, of course, is that - given the trends, the tools we’re building are just the beginning of giving election monitors the tools they’ll need to address these trends. And there’s no time to waste. \o/
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