Inside a dark, mildly air-conditioned room at the Jeane Ayiti Centre de Projets in downtown PetionVille, 12 people sporting “Obsevate” t-shirts sat around the table with their laptops and smartphones. It was March 20, Election Day in Haiti. A small TV off to the side played an England soccer game, but attention was mainly focused front and center to a projection screen displaying a Google Map of Haiti. The map was covered in green house icons with a few red flags scattered around the countryside, testaments to incidents of voting fraud or irregularities that polling station supervisors had reported via an SMS text message.

They were updating the Mwen Konte voting map, a Google map generated from a database of SMS text message reports of irregularities and fraud in the voting process. Cell phones are the communications backbone in Haiti, and they figured prominently in the little-noticed effort to provide transparency in the electoral process, which is typically riddled with fraud and corruption. Sunday's election was the second round of voting after the initial Nov election unraveled amid allegations of fraud. The two candidates that remain are Mirlande Manigat, a seasoned politician and former First Lady, and Michel Martelly, a charismatic show-boater who rose to fame from a career as a pop star.

Tension was high before the election in part because of the spontaneous return of Jean Bertrand Aristide, the first president to be democratically elected in Haiti. While motivations to his return remain speculative, the fact that his political party, Lavalas, was not allowed to participate in the election, piqued worries that his supporters would attempt to disrupt the election, possibly through violent protests at polling stations. This lay atop concerns that the allowed candidates or their supporters would attempt to fraudulently pull the election in their favor.

The Mwen Konte map attempted to track any such disruptions so that after results were tallied, there would be data to back up any claims of fraud — which inevitably the losing party will claim.

This version of the map is based on the concept of USHAHIDI maps, originally designed so people could anonymously report cases of violence and fraud in the Kenya elections. The software has been adapted for a number of purposes since then.

Hans Tippenhauer, President of the Jeane Ayiti Foundation, worked with the software first in the Survivors Connect project, which allowed people to send SMS reports of human rights violations in Haiti. They found that people were much more likely to report crimes if they could do it anonymously and easily in the form of an SMS message, that that these reports could paint a telling picture for human rights organizations to decide where their services were needed most. Specifically, the USHAHIDI maps could illuminate systematic occurrences of child trafficking and crimes against women and pinpoint their locations.

“While we were doing that, we found it was a good way to survey the population,” Tippenhauer said. The goal, he said, was to build a participatory democracy network, and thus Mwen Konte was established.

Generating the Maps

Mwen Konte uses two versions of maps, a Google Map and a USHAHIDI map.

The foundation for either map begins when employees enter the coordinates of the 1,500 polling stations located throughout Haiti. This step was completed by four people weeks before the election using a list provided by the CEP (Council Electoral Provisional), which is the organization officially responsible for carrying out elections in Haiti.

Overlaid on the map will be reports from SMS contributors. Tippenhauer estimated there were between 1,200 and 1,500 registered contributors standing by to report fraud directly from polling stations across Haiti. The contributors were recruited in the previous months by Mwen Konte ambassadors who traveled through several cities explaining the technology of the election mapping systems. Participants who were interested in contributing were given a stipend of 400 Gourdes ($10US) in exchange for providing their name, location and phone number (or BlackBerry Messenger number) to be entered into the Mwen Konte database.

They were also given 25-50 Gourdes of phone units that could be used for calls or text messages on either Digicel or Voila, the two main phone networks in Haiti. Here, instead of payment plans, most people buy small phone cards like these on a pay-as-you-go basis. The phone companies incentivize SMS messaging by giving away text messages, because so many organizations use SMS messaging to track projects.

On Election Day, computer specialist Williams Ulysse sat in front of his laptop, manually overlaying descriptions of election irregularities onto the Google Map. The location data is derived either from geo-location tagging if the contributor had a BlackBerry, or from the location associated with the person’s phone number that was entered into the database upon registration.

At 12:30 pm, Ulysee clicked on a polling station on the map projected onto the screen and entered, “10:15, no ink.” There is typically about an hour delay from the time the data is reported to the time it’s entered.

Let the Data Do the Talking

Halfway through Election Day at about 12:30, there were no reports of fraud, only “irregularities.” This was a change from the previous election where at about the same time, they had already received over 200 reports of fraud.

The distinction between fraud and irregularities is important. Fraud is when a candidate or his/her supporters attempt to pull the results in their favor. For example, people may try to vote multiple times, alter submitted ballots, or interfere with accurate tallying. Irregularities refer to flaws in the voting process itself regardless of voter behavior.

Irregularities are the kind of data the Mwen Konte employees were entering into their mapping system on Election Day, as reports piled in of supplies (ballots, standard issue ballot boxes, ink to record who voted) not having arrived to the polling stations so that when voters arrived, they couldn’t vote.

According to Tippenhauer, the materials came from both local sources, ie: the CEP, and foreign sources like the MINUSTAH (the acronym for the United Nations base in Haiti).

What Tippenhauer noticed from the data, was that the missing materials were almost all ones that should have been provided by foreign sources and the MINUSTAH.

Additionally, the missing materials were associated with polling stations that data from the previous Election Day indicated were in locations where Martelly was favored over Manigat.

“This is not an accusation, just an observation from the data,” Tippenhauer said, though in full disclosure he did say he favored Martelly and had a part in managing his campaign.

Because of the early morning irregularities at some polling stations, many were kept open an extra hour at the end of the day. But despite this, and all the efforts on behalf of several governments, including the US government, to encouraging people to vote, this election produced the lowest turn-out rate ever in the history of Haiti's attempts at democracy.