Population as Auditor of an Election Process in Honduras: The Case of the VotoSocial Crowdsourcing Platform

Abstract

For a country to become fully democratic, the majority of the population needs to be involved in the politics of that country. This requires people to be aware of what is happening, and to be able to participate in the country's political processes. VotoSocial is a crowdsourcing system launched during the 2013 Honduran government elections. It retrieved the official polling table records in digitized form from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (the Government's elections authority) and provided them to the Internet community to be counted and the digitizations verified. VotoSocial was thereby able to verify the accuracy of the official polling results. We found no evidence of fraud in the digitization process, but statistical analysis revealed a data behavior usually associated with incremental fraud in an electoral process. VotoSocial shows that social media‐powered crowdsourcing systems can increase a population's political awareness during elections, thus providing a motive to build similar platforms in other countries with political systems marked by electoral fraud.

Marginality and team building in collaborative crowdsourcing

“…Third, this study examined data from a very specific crowdsourcing community where participants are engaged in both competition and collaboration. We call for future research to test the marginality mechanism in other types of crowdsourcing where participants work on their own, such as conducting language translation remotely and independently (Anastasiou and Gupta, 2011), reporting environmental hazards (Schneider et al, 2017), or reporting voting fraud (Arias et al, 2015), just to name a few. Last but not least, this study employs public behavior data.…”

Domestic Election Monitoring and Advocacy: An Emerging Research Agenda

“…While Skokova's survey in Russia shows that election watch activists are neither members nor supporters of parliamentary parties, 52 the survey conducted by Arias shows that half of the surveyed activists in Honduras were supporters of a smaller opposition party, which only gained 13% of the popular vote in the 2013 election. 53 On the other hand, the game theoretic literature does not fully agree with the purported primacy of impartiality. The formal model developed by Chernykh and Svolik, for instance, shows that monitors do not need to be impartial to be politically consequential.…”

Crowdsourcing for Public Policy and Government

“…Articles emerging from the IPP2014 conference analyze other interesting and comparable applications. In an article titled “Population as Auditor of an Election Process in Honduras: The Case of the VotoSocial Crowdsourcing Platform,” Carlos Arias, Jorge Garcia and Alejandro Corpeño () describe the use of crowdsourcing for auditing election results. Dieter Zinnbauer () discusses the potentials and pitfalls of the use of crowdsourcing for some other types of auditing purposes, in “Crowdsourced Corruption Reporting: What Petrified Forests, Street Music, Bath Towels, and the Taxman Can Tell Us About the Prospects for Its Future.”…”