Burma Election Tracker is a window into a closed election

As polls opened in Burma, our friends at Burma Partnership launched a new site that provides reports, data, and analysis of the election. Burma Election Tracker shows reports and information collected by dozens of local human rights, media, and advocacy organizations. This is an impressive undertaking from an impressive group of organizations.

Presently the site contains nearly 200 reports on the pre-election period. While elections in Burma are widely expected to be problematic and have not been accepted by the main political opposition, they provide an important communications opportunity for activists. Burma Election Tracker tells a compelling story about how the environment leading up to elections fails to provide the conditions for an election that can express the will of the Burmese people.

We are excited about Burma Election Tracker because it combines some elements of crowdsourcing tools like Ushahidi--such as incident mapping and reports based largely on unstructured data--with approaches election monitoring groups would use for providing a clear assessment of the process and advocating for reform. (Burma Partnership and the other participating groups don’t consider their effort to be election monitoring. However they face similar goals and challenges in the way that the use data. Neither is this effort truly crowdsourcing.)

The goal of election monitoring is to provide an assessment of the elections that can be used to improve the process. While this exercise relies on solid, systematic information, it is not enough to simply publish information. Election monitoring groups use their data to communicate key findings and when necessary make a clear case for reform. Burma Election Tracker is another step in the development of tools that citizens can use to assess and improve political processes.

Burma Election Tracker also demonstrates creative approaches to collecting and publishing information about an election in an extremely repressive regime. Rather than mapping points to exact locations, Burma Election Tracker maps events to townships, regions, or states as needed protect the identity and security of reporters. Reports are passed through trusted agents rather than relying on insecure mobile networks. Partner groups are using a variety of tools to move information in and out of the country. Even so, it is difficult to collect information throughout Burma. As the site notes the information on Burma Election Tracker "represent(s) a small portion of similar violations, fraud and atrocities."

Burma Election Tracker will continue to collate reports and information over the coming weeks as they moves across the border. I'll post a followup later this week as the project develops.