Mali poll success for OneWorld's election monitoring initiative
By Daniel Nelson
OneWorld’s groundbreaking election monitoring initiative played a vital role in checking the fairness of the second round of Mali’s presidential election on Sunday.
The initiative saw 1,678 citizen volunteers monitoring polling booths all over the country and sending a stream of on-the-spot reports in the form of coded mobile phone messages to an operations room.
The SMS data covered issues such as whether polling stations were open, voter turnout, the conduct of officials at polling stations, vote counting, violence, vote buying and acts of intimidation.
These messages were de-coded, verified, mapped and charted in real time. Where problem were spotted, election officials were notified so that action could be taken.
The data was also published on the Malivote site.
“The whole operation and the technology performed well – even better than in the first round of voting,” said OneWorld’s Jeffrey Allen.
Fears that heavy rain on Sunday would deter the 6.8 million registered voters proved unfounded, he said, with turnout expected to be put at about 45 per cent, when official figures are announced.
The results of the contest – in which former prime minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who won 40 per cent in the first round, faced ex-finance minister Soumaila Cisse – is expected on Friday.
Voting, and monitoring, in Mali is particularly important because it follows on the disruption caused by rebel seizures of swathes of the country’s northern region, a military coup and intervention by French troops.
The fighting displaced an estimated 450,000 people and Oxfam says ensuing food shortages affected 1.2 million. Some critics called for a postponement of the polls, not least because of inadequacies in the voters’ register. But Western donors warned that $3 billion in aid would be handed over only if elections were held.
Ken Kitson of OneWorld said the “rapid-reaction platform” had been tested in previous polls in Sierra Leone and Senegal. The latter was described by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as "perhaps the most sophisticated monitoring program ever deployed in Africa or anywhere else".
* Mali election won by Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta
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