SMS Election Monitoring

Report

A case study on the use of mobile phones for election monitoring during Sierra Leone’s August 2007 presidential election, the first run by the country’s own National Election Commission rather than the UN since the end of its civil war. It describes how National Election Watch (NEW), a nonpartisan monitoring organisation, deployed thousands of trained volunteer observers who used cell phones to transmit real-time reports from polling stations to NEW’s Freetown headquarters, enabling the organisation to issue an independent, credible assessment of the vote despite fears of post-election violence.