Printer friendly page Indian Citizens Serve as Election Monitors
Open-source technologies empower a geopolitical movement driven by the people.
In late April, ordinary Indian citizens -- the tiffin wallahs, the programmers, and the civil servants -- began casting their votes in the general election for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. But in the land of ancient gods and hereditary castes, the modern political process is fraught with mishaps.
On May 5, because of complaints of rigging, the Election Commission ordered repolling at three locations in the state of Uttar Pradesh. On May 6, supporters of a local candidate in Jaipur were reported to be offering opium to the villagers, justifying the practice as "the strengthening of bond." Elsewhere, reports of distributing homemade alcohol to voters (presumably as bribes) emerged. In some locations, voters reported their names were either missing or duplicated.
The mainstream media reported many of these incidents too. But some of them were coming directly from the voters, submitted online to an interactive map posted at Vote Report India, described as "a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform." Powered by the open-source map engine Ushahidi, the Wikipedia-style election map brings citizen journalism into a whole new dimension -- the geospatial dimension.
