Testing a mobile phone-based system that promises to improve the efficiency of election monitoring in countries around the globe, a three-person team from the College of Computing accompanied a group from the Carter Center to monitor the use of electronic voting technology in the Philippines’ May 10 election.

“Georgia Tech has been active in eDemocracy for several years now,” said Mike Hunter, research scientist in the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), who traveled to Manila with two Tech students and the Carter Center team. “The field is ripe—both for bad guys and for us to step in and establish some best practices.”

Often when monitoring teams are dispatched to observe elections, their destination is a nation whose communications infrastructure is limited. Observers typically record their data on paper, then compare notes when teams reassemble at day’s end. Hunter said researchers in GTISC and elsewhere in the College of Computing had been working on a system that would enable election observers to use an SMS (text-messaging) network to record, transmit and evaluate their reports in real time to a central computer that merges the data and allows for comprehensive analysis.

Hunter called the “beta test” of the system a definite success.

“Across the world, from developing countries to Manhattan, SMS and cellular coverage are becoming ubiquitous,” he said. “No one had any problems transmitting their data.”

Though the May 10 Philippine election, in which offices from the presidency to the national legislature to local positions were decided, was free from these difficulties, Carter Center delegations are regularly sent to observe voting in countries troubled by alleged political corruption, social unrest, war—or, too often, all three. The team will talk to election officials and develop a checklist of questions or issues for observers to watch.

But on election day, circumstances can change quickly. Observers may be out of contact and unable to receive new instructions or compare data until they return to base. The SMS-based system (which for this test used several Google Android-based smartphones) directly addresses that shortcoming.

“Within 15 minutes of the day starting, I felt like we accomplished a lot,” Hunter said, adding that the delegation’s command center began evaluating incoming data and recommending changes in observation strategy just minutes after the polls opened at 7 a.m.

Though the Carter Center was called in specifically to observe the use of electronic voting technology in the Philippines, this was mere coincidence. The GTISC system had nothing to do with voting method; it served only to facilitate the observers’ data gathering and analysis, and could be used in any election regardless of the voting method involved.

The greatest benefit to GTISC, Hunter said, was receiving some “on the ground” wisdom about how the monitoring system should work. He said his two students “received a crash course in dealing with last-minute problems.” Since the monitoring system is designed to support a specific observation plan, when that plan changes, the system needs to change too.

“It may seem trivial, but given how helter skelter things can be in an election setting, we need to set up the system so questions can be changed up until the last minute,” Hunter said. “Having this device in your hand, you want to take full advantage of it. It can enable game-day changes to observation plans, especially in rural or remote areas.”

He also learned that some Philippine election officials appeared intimidated by observers interviewing them and recording data on a digital device. “You can never have enough real-world tests,” he said.

“The biggest surprise to me was how smoothly the application ran,” said Karthik Rangarajan, who’s pursuing his master’s in information security. “On the Command Center side, there were no bugs, and that was just amazing because it was handling a relatively large volume of messages pretty comfortably. I've never deployed software I've written in the real world, so it was an amazing experience.”

“Seeing eDemocracy deployed in the streets of Manila drove home the point that in this case, our ostensibly technical project wasn't really about technology at all,” said Duncan Osborn, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s in computing engineering. “We constantly sought the guidance of the Carter Center personnel that would be using our technology in the field. What makes this project unique is that it was built from the ground up to allow a person, any person, to use our system. I saw firsthand in the Philippines that approaching human social problems requires human-oriented technology.”

The Philippine trip is the latest example of partnership between the College of Computing and the Carter Center. In 2003, then-Dean Rich DeMillo accompanied a Carter Center team to Venezuela to observe that country’s presidential election. And College researchers also have coordinated with Carter Center officials to support the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in Liberia, which under President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is struggling to emerge from two decades of bloody civil war.

“This partnership was a dream come true for my group,” Hunter said. “This was a real world situation, with a real customer—and a demanding customer, which is what you want. The suggestions we got from the Carter Center team were invaluable.”

“As election observers, we are very interested in the role of technology on the electoral process,” said Avery Davis-Roberts, assistant director of the Carter Center’s Democracy Program. “However, we have only recently begun to think in more detail about the ways in which technology can impact our own work. The Carter Center’s democracy program has been working with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech to develop practical tools for observers that make the most of SMS technology and allow for rapid data aggregation.

“This has the potential,” Davis-Roberts continued, “to be a real benefit to observation missions where the quick collection of information from around the country is an absolute necessity.”