SMS election monitoring in Senegal


Posted on April 6, 2012  /  0 Comments

I have an unusual interest in Senegal. I’ve been there several times, but more than that, the former Foreign Minister and one of the unsuccessful Presidential candidates, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio is a good friend. So I follow the news more closely than usual. Here is a little piece from the Economist. The novelty is the use of a computer server outside the country.

To guard against expected cheating in the second round, opposition activists dispatched observers to each of more than 11,000 polling stations, who then text-messaged voting counts to their own collation centre in Dakar, using independent communications links run from a computer server outside the country. The monitoring effort, which may have been the most sophisticated yet deployed in Africa, was funded in part by Western governments and the Open Society Initiative, a campaign group founded by George Soros, a liberal financier.

Comments are closed.