Comparative use of web form, SMS, and chatbot in Social Election monitoring of the Dominican 2016 General Election

This paper reports on the use of web form, SMS, and chatbot for social election monitoring in the Dominican Republic for the May 15, 2016 General Elections. This case study provides evidence that bots can support the work of social election monitoring by effectively collecting election-relevant and actionable reports from voters on election irregularities. While this suggests bots are a promising tool, social media aggregators that enable crossmedia sourcing of reports are still needed as web form based crowdsourcing was the most effective for generating reports.