IJDH Launches Ground Sourcing Initiative

The Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti deployed a ground sourcing initiative to allow Haitians to report on electoral abuses and to make them public. It included a hotline number voters could call (and 80,000 SMS messages inviting input), as well as 30,000 automated calls proactively asking about Election Day problems. 

The initiative experienced some technical problems in the beginning, but more importantly had a low response rate, much lower than for similar initiatives in other countries. 3,535 people so far responded and got far enough through the system to answer the question of whether they witnessed problems. We are not yet sure why the response was low. Potential causes include the inundation of election-related robo calls lately, a distrust of polling, and or that the survey took too long to complete.

We are in the process of analyzing the data, and will get the full numbers out. But the preliminary results appear to concur with the anecdotal evidence of an election with serious problems, but significant improvements over August 9.  

• 25% of those answering the question (885) reported problems, 75% (2,650) did not;
• 40% of those who did report problems reported violent incidents (10% of those who responded to the question about problems);
• 33% of those who answered the question about fraud reported they witnessed fraud.