“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” —Joseph Stalin
To limit voter suppression and shine the light on election malpractices, we created a prototype monitoring survey application using available GIS technology, Survey123 for ArcGIS. This monitoring application is modeled to be used by a credible, independent organization that has the capability to deploy personnel to each polling unit across the country. These individuals will have access to this monitoring app only in the morning of the elections and after logging into the device, will answer a series of pre-populated questions that will verify their identity as well as the unit of assignment. After this verification process, these individuals can then monitor the voting process through this application, take pictures and fill out pre-populated reports that can help reviewers understand what is going on in real-time at these polling units.
The results of these surveys will be published publicly and can be visualized in a web mapping application. This allows one to associate an incident to an exact location where it happened, and depending on the intensity, this will help the electoral commission to decide whether or not to cancel a polling unit. See a sample of the results below, following a few reports made solely for testing purposes way before the election day.
Click on each points to see what sample reports were made, click on each state to see its associating demographics