A Kenyan non-profit company has launched a website which lets voters report irregularities on polling day and is set to help monitor the US elections.
Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili is a multinational software enterprise headquartered in Nairobi with around 30 employees working in eight countries. The creators want to promote transparency – with a tool they invented in a time of bloodshed.
The company has put up a special website where voters can report any irregularities or problems they may encounter at the polling stations. They can, for example, flag up that ballot papers have run out or that disabled people have a hard time accessing the polling booth – or that there’s nothing wrong at all. Ushahidi collects and maps all this information to visualise the bigger picture.
“My real hope is that on Wednesday we look at the report and that 99.9 percent of reports say: ‘Everything went great!’,” says Nat Manning, Ushahidi’s COO who’s based in San Francisco.
2007 running into early 2008 saw Kenya go into turmoil that left at least 1,000 dead. Former president Mwai Kibaki had been declared the winner of a controversial presidential election which reeked of fraud and corruption on both sides. Violence erupted between different ethnic groups throughout the country. It was hard for the media to keep track because many of the murders happened in remote regions.
A group of tech-savvy Kenyans got together to develop Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing software that let people report cases of violence and tracked them on a map. This provided a far more complete picture of the situation than any news outlet had given at the time.
In the US, structures to prevent voter fraud already seem quite fail-safe. The different states and parties as well as outside observers all independently monitor the polling. But Manning thinks Ushahidi can still add to the process. “It allows regular citizens to raise their voice. It puts a lot more eyes out there. And importantly, it creates a feeling of transparency and engagement,” he told DW.
In the run-up to this year’s election in the US there has been much talk about ‘rigging’ and ‘fraud’ mainly by the Republican candidate Donald Trump. Contrary though, there’s only little evidence that large-scale fraud is an issue in the United States. A study from 2014, for instance, found there have only been 31 cases of impersonation fraud between 2000 and 2014 – out of one billion ballots cast. The difference between what’s being said and what really happens spurred on Ushahidi’s efforts to make this election even more transparent.
“We just couldn’t sit by and let people put unfair doubt on to what is truly a miraculous and wonderful thing – that we all go out and vote and have this peaceful transition of power every four to eight years,” Manning said.
Ushahidi, a tool sparked by crisis in Kenya will help to keep elections fair in the United States whatever the outcome.
