eDemocs: Electronic Distributed Election Monitoring over Cellular Systems

Formal election observation involves appointed observers recording and reporting remote observations over the duration of an election and analysts promptly issuing conclusions based on studying these observations. This paper discusses the design and performance of eDemocs (Electronic Distributed Election Monitoring over Cellular Systems), created to aid the election monitoring process by enabling rapid and trustworthy flow of observations from the reporting sites along with immediate access to the observations by the analysts. We discuss the architecture for our system and evaluate a prototype implementation and trial deployment in a US election. Our architecture is shown to be feasible and to demonstrate several desirable qualities, including integrity guarantees and full deploy ability in developing countries through reliance on SMS messaging without requiring Internet connectivity.