Do you want another example of how the Internet is good for democracy? A remarkable occurrence is taking place in Argentina, and its all to do with the empowering nature of the Internet. A group of Citizens have set up a site 'Wikivotos' - a kind of citizen's audit - which analyses election results in the country - unearthing fraudulent activity. Any irregularities found are published across social media and the rest of the world-wide web.
The site's aim is to act as a:
"movement aimed at uncovering the gross faults in the Argentine Primaries Elections held the 14 of August 2011. We have found errors in nearly 5000 telegrams submitted by the polling places. That is 1.5 Million votes. Some are innocent human errors. Some indicate the deliberate and systematic intent to present the scenario that was later delivered to the media. That the president obtained a shattering victory and no one to follow. It seemed too perfect. When something is too good to be true it probably is. Our research began when the people from movement LeemeXII where in the computing center and began identifying these irregular numbers. That is when we started investigating the public information available and found out about this attempt to tamper with our election system. This website is full of these links to the telegram database exposing these problems. We are reaching out to everyone about this. We want to change our election system to a single ballot system with minimal human data entry and that can be controlled by everyone.
Help us to OPEN DATA!"
It is a fantastic concept. Whereas in the past, you would have to rely on 'the great and the good', observing elections, often from 'august' bodies like the UN/OSCE et al, now the internet is empowering people to act as independent election monitors. Of course, this is only a small step, and very hard to do in seriously authoritarian countries. Nevertheless, it does indicate a portent of things to come: if not the democratisation of elections, the emancipation of election observers.
You can read more here: and here .
The Huffington Post also has a take on this.
It sounds very interesting! And it would be very interesting ... if it were like that.
ReplyDeleteToo bad this is not the whole truth. Wikivotos was not created by a "group of citizens", but by people close to one of the candidates (the most right-wing of them). They say it publicly, and indeed there is a link on the page.
Wikivotos not really dedicated to control the election (for that they would have to be more serious and do some type of statistical analysis). What they do is to create alarm based on telegrams that have no legal value and are usually messily completed. The difference this year is that the Argentine government decided to publish these telegrams (they were always hidden before). The real election doesn't count on these telegrams but on "actas" (official records) (which were not challenged by anyone). On top of scrutiny based on these records is giving almost identical results to that based on the telegrams! So there's no fraud at all!
The intention is to "make noise" because sectors behind wikivotos lost, to try to win more votes for the October election. And to discredit democracy itself in a country which is has relatively recent come out of dictatorial or pseudo-democratic government,
A secondary objective is to promote the "single ticket" that would be a nice change, but it is impractical to implement such a radical change in just over a month (and ask for the ballot for them to fix problems that had alliances after the defeat not because they want to improve the system).
The news article you quote was not created by a neutral party It was written by en employee of "Clarín", the media conglomerate which is furiously against the current government.
I understand it's very difficult to get a clear view of another country's politics... Sometimes things are not exactly as they seem.
Regards.
I think what Nicolás said should be clarified. The so called actas, which are taken into account for the official result, were made by the same people who made the telegramas, so there is no difference. Even more, to modify the telegrams is in itself an offense penalized with a 4month-6years imprisonment.
ReplyDeleteA judge of the Supreme Court said that there were serious irregularities in these elections. The electoral justice also warned days before the elections about the risk involved in the telegrams being in hand of the government, instead of justice.
And finally, it doesn't matter what the results are or whether irregularities were proved, they already stated that won't recount the votes of any ballot because lack of time. What a mock of democracy.
The fraud has already been committed.
Nicolás, yo no trabajo para Wikivotos, no soy de -amadeo ni de ningún otro.
ReplyDeletePero me tomé el trabajo de revisar por mi cuenta, cien telegramas correlativos.
En el 70% aprox. faltaban dato, estaban mal sumados y no coincidían totales por categoría con total de electores.
No se para que lado fueron a parar los votos perdidos.
Pero si no saben contar o sumar, de que sirve que votemos?
Y, si no sabés, el telegrama debería tener los mismos datos que las actas. O sea, las actas también estan mal sumadas.
En realidad, no se como se puede tolerar tal desprolijidad. Y no hablo de fraude.
Sañudos