April 10, 2008 | The Economist Special Report: Nomads at Last
A World of Witnesses: When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor
Until a couple of years ago election monitoring was a fiddly, exhausting and often thankless business. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as America's National Democratic Institute (NDI) would send idealistic student volunteers to complicated places such as Nigeria to observe the balloting, write down data on pieces of paper and then carry or fax the forms somewhere for manual input into a computer system. The process was slow and unreliable. Fraud or violence, if it broke out, spread far faster than credible information.
Then, in 2006, a penny dropped. NDI, working with an organisation in Montenegro, realised that practically everybody in that country already had the perfect tool to monitor, in all but real time, its election that May. That tool was the mobile phone and its ability to send text messages directly to a computer. The new approach worked so well that it instantly became the standard for monitoring other precarious elections. A vote in Sierra Leone last August briefly threatened to disintegrate amid rumours of violence—also spread through text messages—but quickly returned to order when some 500 observers at the various polling stations sent text messages to the central system saying that the rumours were false.
The sheer ubiquity of mobile phones amounts to “the biggest leap in history, bigger than the printing press, which, after all, stayed in the hands of very few people,” says Katrin Verclas, who runs MobileActive.org, a website and community of about 3,000 activists and NGOs all over the world. Even quite basic features such as text messaging, she says, have already allowed countless people everywhere to get more involved in areas traditionally reserved for “activists”. The snazzy new features and internet access now coming to mobile phones will expand the possibilities yet again.
