Website keeps candidates in line

Jonathan Spollen, Assistant Foreign Editor

• Last Updated: April 27. 2009 4:00PM UAE / April 27. 2009 12:00PM GMT

The Indian elections have not been short of incident. Varun Gandhi delivered what some say amounted to hate speech, Maoists attacked poll officials in Chhattisgarh, resulting in seven deaths, and Lashkar-i-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group, has threatened violence.

Along with scores of other violations of electoral conduct, from bribery to the theft of voting machines, all were duly noted and posted on Vote Report India, a website dedicated to what it calls “citizen-driven election monitoring”.

The site allows individuals from anywhere in India to report occurrences of misconduct via telephone, e-mail, SMS and blog links, which are then aggregated by the site administrators with news reports, other blog posts, photos, videos and tweets (Twitter messages) of the same incident to verify its truth.

Set up this month before the first phase of voting to “increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process”, the site receives about 20 reports a day, though this spiked to more than 60 on the first day of voting, April 16.

“We are having a lot of success within the online community. There is a lot of awareness, a lot of people linking to us,” said Gaurav Mishra, 29, a core member of VRI’s 35-person team.

Visitors to the site will find on the home page a map of India scattered with red dots indicating areas where violations have been reported. The bigger the dot, the greater the number of incidents in that particular area or constituency, and clicking on it will bring links to the reports.

Click on the bloated Nagpur, for example, and you will find 12 reports including cases of bribery and the arrest of a Republican Party candidate for using fake documents.

Meanwhile, in the north-eastern state of Manipur, 14 electronic voting machines were snatched during polling, while in the western state of Rajasthan, a BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, was caught on camera handing out money to voters.

Mr Mishra said the most reported violation of electoral conduct so far has been hate speech by candidates against various religions, castes and communities.

To this end he praised the Indian election commission – many of whose reports VRI carries – for being “extremely vigilant” in such cases.

Analysts say VRI and other election-monitoring sites and media are forcing politicians to be more accountable and to think twice about indulging in acts that might be seen as corrupt.

“Politicians are more answerable now,” said Animesh Bhaya, 25, a producer with Star television in New Delhi. “Lots of things used to get covered up, but they are being very cautious now. In the long run [Indian elections] will be more visible.”

An all-volunteer collaboration between software developers, designers, academics and other professionals, the site has been endorsed by four major human rights and pro-democracy groups and has accrued a number of media partners, among them the Global Voices website and Al Jazeera English.

VRI’s work spans India, Africa and the United States, Mr Mishra said. “The goal is to spread beyond this.”

The concept of VRI’s citizen election monitoring, however, comes from the award-winning website Ushahidi.com, which was set up to map reports of post-election violence in Kenya in 2008.

Ushahidi, meaning “testimony” in Swahili, “crowdsources crisis information” using the original platform – citizen reporting via telephone, e-mail, SMS, etc – that VRI now uses.

Indeed, half of the VRI team are also involved in Ushahidi.

Mr Mishra holds a fellowship in communications sponsored by internet giant Yahoo at Georgetown University. He said similar election-monitoring sites are now operating in Congo, South Africa and the Gaza Strip.

His hope is that the number of reports per day will increase as the Indian elections progress.

Mr Bhaya of Star TV has no doubt they will. “More and more people have internet now, and they can [make these reports] from the comfort of their own home,” he said.

“This is making a positive impact.”

jspollen@thenational.ae