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Text Messages Used To Monitor Elections
InternetVoting writes "The upcoming historic Nigerian elections are going to be defended by an army of observers armed, not with guns, but with text messages. Every one of the observers will be outfitted with a cell phone to report vote tampering. The volunteers are a part of the Network of Mobile Election Monitors, and they use freeware to do what they do. From the article: 'NMEM is using a free system called Frontline SMS, developed by programmer Ken Banks, to keep track of all of the texts. Originally developed for conservationists to keep in touch with communities in National Parks in South Africa, the system allows mass-messaging to mobile phones and crucially the ability to reply to a central computer. It has already been used in countries such as Zimbabwe as a way of bypassing broadcast restrictions and distributing information to rural communities.'"
I'll put this in terms most Slashdotters will understand:
select quote_text from quote where author like 'benjamin%' and quote_text like '%vigil%';
This is the number to call if you'd like to report a fraud during the Nigerian election : 1-888-GO-419
You'll soon get called back by voting official Dr. Adewale Johnson, who incidentally also has a lot of money locked up in a bank account and needs your help.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Cue the 4-1-9 jokes in 3... 2... 1...
Its too simple. You guys don't know what you are talking about. Doing it all with one computer and an SMS modem? You can't future proof it that way. I want to see some mention of CORBA and SOAP. How can you have a system without middleware? I keep searching for contractors using your keywords and nobody is coming up.
Can you use dot NET? Everybody uses that these days. And what if I want to use it when I am already on the phone. Can't it have a WAP interface as well? Listen, I don't give a shit that the thing works. I want to sell a thousand copies of this thing and nobody is going to pay a million bucks for something which doesn't use a single cutting edge technology.
And don't get me started on your engineering practices. Last month this POS stopped working and you attached it to a different power circuit and a came right up. You can't make any money off maintenance that way. You need to network at least three computers with 12 daemons which have to start in a specific order, and have it crash from running out of memory at least once a week. Fault calls are where the real money is made. Lets see some forward thinking thanks.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Cell phones used for communication! How terribly clever! What will they come up with next?!
Bot Assisted Blogging
The way you eliminate election fraud is with a simple method from the "R" in RSA: 3ballot.
http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html
Makes me wonder when election campaigns start to apply the actual science to elections. There are fairly robust natural language processing techniques available for what is called "sentiment classification". You define a set of topics and a machine can analyze, say, local newspapers and blogs to gauge with fairly high precision whether the candidate is getting praised or lambasted on certain issues, and how strongly. Since most of the stuff is on the web, analysis could be done in near-real time. This could then be used to place geotargeted election ads in the area (in papers, or even on Google if it decides to support ip-based geotargeting) crapping onto the other candidates and creating an impression that your candidate isn't as bad as papers portray him. All you need to do this today is one or two PhDs and a small compute cluster. Having seen the results of recent attempts at sentiment classification, I could even say that you could elect a complete turd if you use it creatively and have enough money to buy ads. You will simply _know_ what people want (or don't want) to hear.
I can't see a mention of freeware. Perhaps it's free software?
Not that it will do any good. Observers != enforcers.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I'm about to vote in an hour. How do I become a volunteer? Are the text messages supposed to be in a specific format?
Hopefully, this technology can take Nigeria a step closer to being as free, open, and peaceful as Zimbabwe.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I was just thinking it would be nice if there were an honest election here for once.
Somebody needs to kick these mafia thugs out of Washington DC... The whole lot of them. Maybe bring back the gallows from France... but some of these people, and their war crimes, maybe hangings too good for them... Be glad to hand over Bush/Rumsy/etc to a free Iraq after a swift withdrawal...
is that the country where the niggers come from?
Not settling for attaching a cubit of information to each electron, Nigerian scientists have found a way to attach an entire 255 character text string. The system uses a network of Mobile Electron Monitors, made out of pixie dust, who's existence was predicted by Jamie Zawinski's Theory of Open Source in 1999. Originally developed for conversationalists to keep in contact using their thumbs, the Simple Message Service allows electrons to share a significant amount of information all at once and the ability to communicate with the scientists using the familiar cell phone network. SMS is already in use by a large number of gregarious teens to bypass note passing laws in many western classrooms.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
It's nice that they're applying technology to the ancient idea of voting, but can't we go altogether modern and implement open source government systems? Something like the Metagovernment would be even more effective at fighting corruption in Nigeria -- and every else.
Why do we keep having leaders, when we are perfectly capable of governing ourselves?
I'll do ya one better: http://www.metagovernment.org/
With prices of $0.10 or more for each text coming and going yes you pay for incoming texts.
w?ow cellfones to monitor elections! what will they think of next? maybe jojo the boatman is gonna be oone of the monitors?
Now here's one iPoddy site! iPod Range
Hmm... How many Nigerian Slashdotters are there?
It's easy, natural and fun to look at this effort with cynicism, but it really does represent a great application of information sharing in the service of freedom.
Cell phones are relatively cheap, ubiquitous and easy to use. If the procedures promoted in the articles really do make if more difficult to manipulate elections, they should be exported to my own country.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Can we hack the Nigerian election and get W elected President of Nigeria?
Remember the future...
Read the title as "Text Messages used to monitor Electrons"?
I Need to stop reading slashdot five minutes after I wake up.
Disclaimer: I'm a volunteer in Cambodia whose terms of engagement prevent me from voicing opinions of a political nature. Hence the AC post.
An "independent" (as far as anything in Cambodia is independent) NGO called NICFEC set up an SMS monitoring and reporting system for the countries local commune elections over the first weekend in April. Local elections in Cambodia take place every 5 years and are a national event.
3 days before the polls opened, the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) arranged for the country's mobile cellular network to be shut down under the auspices that text messages could be used to violate campaigning rules: candidates are forbidden from campaigning on the day preceding voting day as well as the day itself. This was the first time recorded in the world where mobile phone technology had been targeted in such a way.
Most people (locals and foreigners) believe the CPP cares little for the campaigning rules (every candidate flouts them) and instead wanted to hamper the election observers.
I realise this is only slightly related to the original story. I truly hope the Nigerian implementation works as well as it should. For Cambodians however, the experiment served only to remind us how much power the CPP wield in this country.