Smartphone snaps help deter election fraud

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

Election workers count ballot papers for parliamentary elections, Kandahar, Afghanistan, in September 2010 (Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)

Election fraud is a fact of life in Afghanistan. In 2009, protest over the validity of the presidential election led to nationwide bloodshed, and in parliamentary elections the following year nearly a quarter of the ballots were discredited.

Now a study suggests that a simple snap with a smartphone camera could help make elections fairer.

A team at the University of California, San Diego, wanted to determine whether monitoring election fraud with cellphones could make the democratic process more robust. Focussing on Afghanistan, they arranged for photos of electoral returns forms to be taken at each polling station across a certain area the morning after voting.

The electoral returns form is a record of the total votes for each candidate at that location, and is relatively easily to tamper with either at the polling station or en route to the national aggregation centre.

The team sent out local researchers to take pictures of the forms containing the final count result at more than 400 polling stations during the 2010 parliamentary elections. On the day of voting, around half of the stations in the study were told that this instantaneous record would be made the following day. The research, presented by Michael Callen of the university's Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation at Growth Week in London this week, found that this announcement of monitoring reduced the amount of tampering by 60 per cent.

Comparing the photographs with records from the national aggregation centre, they found that this drop in tampering had the knock-on effect of reducing the number of votes for politically powerful candidates by around 25 per cent.

More influential candidates who have stronger political connections can tamper with the results, the team conclude, because they can provide protection for the election officials who would have access to the electoral returns form.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/23e22102/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C0A90Csmartphone0Esnaps0Eelection0Efraud0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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