Lessons in Social Election Monitoring

Since 2011, our research group, along with numerous local partners, has been building a platform and methodology for monitoring elections using social media. Historically, election monitoring has traditionally been the domain of trained monitors provided by international monitoring groups. But monitoring by domestic groups with fewer resources has been a growing phenomenon, supported in part by the availability of inexpensive digital technologies such as SMS. Social media represents a further, exciting step in this trend. We describe our five years of experience in this endeavor and report a series of key lessons learned. These lessons touch on issues such as source types and curation, collaboration with other election-related groups, human vs. automated analysis, varying stakeholder needs, and the value of falsification. We also share our vision for the next five years of this research.