Monitoring the Zambian election

Through a random expat acquaintance – a Czech guy I met at a BBQ two months ago and ran into at the mall last week – I landed a volunteering gig to help monitor last week’s election.

This was an exciting opportunity for me – to witness the inner workings of a fledgling African democracy, and partake in election monitoring, an activity that has always intrigued me. For all the emphasis that is put on the importance of fair elections, grasping the actual process, in all its complexity and scope, isn’t straightforward.

The Foundation for Democratic Processes (FODEP) was one of the primary monitors of last Thursday’s vote, which it deemed free and fair. The organization hired 922 monitors to be placed in every voting booth in every polling station across the country, including 150 supervisors, one per constituency.

FODEP teamed up with the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) to implement a procedure called Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT), whereby monitors across the country observe the vote counting process at the constituency level and transmit the numbers, via their supervisors, to NDI. As the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) tallied its results, NDI and FODEP simultaneously tallied theirs, and could then confirm or reject the official announcement.

After a day-long training session, I was assigned the task of working in the FODEP “command centre” in Lusaka. My job, performed in two all-night shifts from 9:30pm to 5:30am, beginning the night the polls closed, was to proactively contact FODEP supervisors across Zambia and collect their results. Along with a dozen or so other phone operators, I dialed supervisors’ numbers into the early hours of the morning, carefully documenting their observed vote tallies for each polling station, as well as qualitative observations made according to a multiple-choice form.

The experience, though arduous, was rewarding. I was blown away by the sheer scale of the project. NDI staff from the U.S. and elsewhere worked around the clock for several days analyzing results and overseeing our work. Using piles of new mobile phones, state-of-the-art computers and a thousand personnel, a civil society organization was able to follow a national election and arrive at a result independently of the government process.

I struggled with phone reception, communication barriers and other technical issues. But Zambian spelling is thoroughly phonetic, meaning I could spell most words simply by slowly repeating them out loud. My non-Zambian status didn’t go unnoticed – one supervisor called the centre and asked for the white man she’d been speaking to; several of my fellow volunteers approached me with queries, assuming I was part of NDI’s international staff.

All in all, however, the prevalence of the English language and cell phones made possible a remarkable process that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. Some say there were problems with the vote – opposition leader Michael Sata has pledged to take the ECZ to court over rigging. You can call me naïve, but having participated in FODEP’s grassroots monitoring process, I fail to see how substantial rigging could have taken place.

Tomorrow, an election thirty times bigger and infinitely more significant globally will take place. It consoles me to know that in the United States, like in Zambia, election monitors will help to keep the process in check [OSCE begins monitoring of US elections].