NDI Election Monitoring Tools

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The US State Department’s America.gov profiled how the National Democratic Institute (NDI) has used mobile and satellite phones to support election monitoring in more than 70 countries, transmitting observer reports in real time using SMS. In Ghana’s closely contested December 2008 presidential election and runoff, NDI worked with local group the Center for Democratic Development (CDD) to deploy 1,070 trained volunteer observers across 230 constituencies, who used coded text messages of 160 characters or fewer to report from polling stations to a command centre, where software processed the results within minutes, a system NDI had previously used to monitor elections in Sierra Leone, Montenegro, Indonesia and the Palestinian Authority, and which NDI staff said gave CDD its own results well ahead of Ghana’s official electoral commission.