Crowdsourcing Accountability in a Nigerian Election

We explore the capacity for new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to facilitate crowdsourced elections monitoring. In broad terms, we are interested in digitally enabled collective action initiatives by nonstate actors, especially in places where the state is incapable of meeting the expectations of democratic governance. In the case at hand, we test for effects of crowdsourcing elections monitoring in the form of citizen-generated reports of failures, abuses, and successes through the Ushahidi open-source geographical information systems (GIS) platform in regard to the 2011 Nigerian elections. Controlling for a number of factors, we find that the number and nature of crowdmap reports generated by citizens is significantly correlated with increased voter turnout in the 2011 Nigerian presidential election as a result of providing officials with improved information about the functionality of local polling stations.