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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Allegra Stratton

Watching for electoral fraud in Zimbabwe

Reasons to be worried:

1. The Zimbabwean government has restricted the number of election monitors allowed into the country.

2: The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangarai, says Robert Mugabe's ruling party has printed 9m ballot papers - for a nation of 5.9 million people.

3: 90,000 polling officers will be on hand to help illiterate voters - but will they doctor their votes?

What to do?

Ethan Zuckerman draws our attention to one attempt to map election rigging. Run by the activist organisation Sokwanele, he calls it a "Google Maps mashup of election-rigging incidents".

Every icon added to the map tomorrow will represent another report of an incident that contravenes the standards held by the Southern African Development Community.

Since the site is not pronouncing each reported incident as actual evidence of election fraud, it is seen as an aggregator of information, and so may steer clear of Zimbabwean laws requiring journalists to be licensed.

The initiative is similar to that of Ushahidi, which monitored flashpoints of violence in Kenya. That site was eventually shut down.

We wait to see whether Sokwanele manages to keep on the right side of the law.

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