Launching Ushahidi's Election Data Resilience Initiative

As the digital landscape evolves, the role of open-source technologies and decentralized web storage has never been more critical. This is the second blog in a three-part series that delves into the revolutionary potential of decentralized technologies, including decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin. This article will focus on the work between Ushahidi, a leader in crisis mapping and data management, and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), to create a revolutionary election data archive and why this is important in the current environment. Don’t miss the first post in this series, The Transformative Power of Open Source Technologies and Decentralized Web Storage.

 

What is Election Data and What Does it Do?

Election data encompasses a wide range of information collected before, during, and after elections. This includes voter registrations, polling locations, election results, incidents of irregularities, and citizen reports. Such data is crucial for ensuring the transparency, accountability, and integrity of the electoral process. It serves as the foundation for verifying the fairness of elections, identifying and addressing issues, and informing future improvements in the democratic process.

 

 

Historical Uses of Election Data

 

Election monitoring

Organizations like Ushahidi have utilized election data to monitor elections in real-time, allowing for the rapid identification and response to irregularities. For example, during the2022 Kenyan elections, Ushahidi's platform, through the Uchaguzi initiative, enabled citizens to report incidents of violence and electoral misconduct, which were then visualized on a live map.

 

Voter education

Election data has been used to inform and educate voters about the electoral process, polling locations, and candidates. This was evident in the 2020 US Presidential Election, where data-driven platforms provided voters with up-to-date information on where and how to vote.

 

Post-election analysis

Researchers and policymakers analyze election data to understand voter behavior, electoral trends, and the impact of various policies. This analysis can lead to reforms aimed at improving the electoral process. For example, data from the 2019 Indian General Election has been extensively analyzed to study voter turnout patterns and the effectiveness of different campaigning strategies.

 

Accountability and transparency

By making election data publicly available, authorities and independent organizations can ensure that elections are conducted fairly and transparently. This was the case in the 2018 Brazilian General Election, where the publication of detailed election data allowed for independent verification and analysis of the results.

 

Importance and Vulnerability of Election Data

Election data plays a pivotal role in ensuring the transparency, accountability, and integrity of democratic processes. It includes a wide range of information such as voter registrations, election results, citizen reports, and incidents of irregularities. This data is essential for:

• Transparency and Trust: Making election data publicly available allows citizens and independent organizations to verify the fairness of the election process, fostering trust in the system.
• Accountability: Election data helps in holding authorities accountable for conducting free and fair elections. It provides evidence for investigating and addressing any discrepancies or irregularities.
• Informed Decision-Making: Researchers, policymakers, and civil society organizations use election data to analyze electoral trends, voter behavior, and the impact of various policies, which can inform future democratic reforms.
• Historical Record: Preserving election data creates a historical record that can be used to understand and learn from past electoral processes.

 

Despite its importance, election data is particularly vulnerable due to several factors:

• Tampering and manipulation: Election data can be targeted for tampering or manipulation to influence outcomes, undermine trust, or spread misinformation.
• Cyber-attacks: With the increasing digitization of election systems, there is a heightened risk of cyber-attacks aimed at stealing, altering, or destroying election data.
• Data loss: In many regions, election data is not adequately backed up or stored, making it susceptible to loss due to technical failures, natural disasters, or human error.
• Political interference: Election data can be suppressed or altered by political entities to maintain power or discredit opponents, compromising the integrity of the electoral process.

 

The Resilient Election Data Archive

To address these vulnerabilities, Ushahidi and FFDW collaborated to create an Election Data Archive. This archive will serve as a resilient repository for citizen reports crowdsourced during elections, ensuring that this invaluable data remains accessible, secure, and tamper-proof for the long term. Some of the benefits include:

• Security and tamper-proofing: By using decentralized storage through the Filecoin network, the archive makes it exceedingly difficult for any single entity to tamper with or manipulate the data. Data hashing provides a unique identifier that verifies the integrity of the stored information.
• Protection against cyber-attacks: Decentralized storage spreads data across multiple nodes, reducing the risk of a single point of failure and enhancing resistance against cyber-attacks.
• Data preservation and accessibility: The archive ensures that election data is backed up and preserved in a decentralized manner, protecting it from loss due to technical failures or disasters. This redundancy ensures long-term accessibility.
• Political neutrality: Decentralization prevents any one political entity from controlling the data, thus maintaining the integrity and neutrality of the election information.

 

Furthermore, the archive ensures that this critical information remains a public good, accessible and valuable to researchers, policymakers, civil society organizations, and the public.

The illustration above outlines the flow of data from collection to decentralized storage, and finally to public access, highlighting the secure and transparent nature of the system. Here's a description of the elements included:

• Data collection: Ushahidi and partners gather citizen reports and crowdsourced data related to elections. This data can come from diverse channels, including SMS, USSD, WhatsApp, email, and web forms, and is aggregated within an Ushahidi deployment. This approach allows for a wide array of perspectives and information to be captured.
• Data preparation: This involves processing unstructured reports to enhance usability. This process includes cleaning the data to remove inconsistencies and errors and categorizing it into predefined categories for better organization. This ensures that the information is accurate, reliable, and easy to analyze.
• Ingestion: This involves securely extracting and preprocessing data from the respective channel while ensuring data integrity and consistency. This process includes handling the associated metadata, which provides important details such as the data's origin, categories, format, and timestamp. These metadata elements are crucial for organizing and understanding the election data effectively.
• Decentralized storage system: The Filecoin network incentivizes decentralized storage providers to maintain data availability and immutability, ensuring that the stored data remains accessible and unaltered over time. Data hashing is also employed to guarantee the integrity of the data, providing a unique identifier that can be used to verify that the data has not been tampered with. Together, these components create a robust and secure decentralized storage solution.
• Access and retrieval: Ushahidi offers a web-based interface for civil society organizations, researchers, policymakers, and the public to browse and download election data. The data is stored on a tamper-proof ledger for transparency and traceability, with proof-of-storage mechanisms to ensure data has been stored correctly over time.

This entire archive system described above is designed to be secure, transparent, and resilient, ensuring that critical election data is preserved and accessible. It leverages Filecoin’s decentralized storage network. This system not only secures the data but also democratizes access, making it available to researchers, policymakers, and the public. Starting today, the Ushahidi Data Archive can be accessed here.

 

Ushahidi has been at the forefront of utilizing open-source technology for social impact since its founding in 2008, following the post-election violence in Kenya. The platform has been instrumental in election monitoring, disaster response, climate action, and human rights protection, empowering citizens to report incidents and share real-time information. This evolution continues as we integrate cutting-edge technologies to meet the growing needs of our global user base.

 

"Our collaboration with Ushahidi represents a pivotal moment in harnessing decentralized technologies for global social impact. By leveraging the Filecoin network to create a resilient and tamper-proof election data archive, we're not just preserving information – we’re creating a foundation for verifiable data that can shape future policies and initiatives,” said Danny O’Brien, Senior Fellow and Head of DWeb at FFDW.

 

Stay engaged with Ushahidi as we continue to innovate and empower communities worldwide through technology. Together, we can harness the power of data to drive meaningful change.

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