A First Look at "Eyes on the Vote"

Traditional election monitoring involves trained observers recruited and deployed by neutral organizations to complete structured reports based on their first-hand observations. In contrast, social media-based election monitoring takes as input the high volume, noisy data produced by individuals posting on social media outlets, with limited constraints and structure. Trained volunteers process this data in an effort to extract meaningful information. Both methods have been used successfully to support free and fair elections. In this work we begin to explore a middle ground, namely reports by untrained individuals, but mediated through a mobile phone application that provides structure for the responses. In collaboration with Pol-IT, a Buenos Aires based organization focused on politics and ICTs, we report on a first study of users of the Ojo con el Voto (Eyes on the Vote) application deployed during the Argentina presidential run-off election in November 2015. We expect that citizen apps for election monitoring will become increasingly popular, hence this early look at their use offers an opportunity to establish an initial baseline and to potentially influence subsequent development.