Crowdsourcing election monitoring in the 2011–2012 Russian elections
Max Bader · East European Politics · 2013
The 2011–2012 election cycle in Russia featured an innovation in election monitoring: the crowdsourcing, through the Web-based Karta Narusheniy tool, of information about electoral violations by thousands of individuals across Russia, resulting in a database that contains over 13,000 reports. This study assesses the collective ability of the contributors to the Karta Narusheniy to detect fraud, and looks at what the reports on the Karta Narusheniy reveal about the types and spatial distribution of fraud in the 2011–2012 elections. The article finds that, on the whole, the Karta Narusheniy has been a credible source of information about election fraud. Moreover, the information contained on the Karta Narusheniy, when properly analysed, enhances our insight into how elections in Russia are manipulated.