by Sarah Trister
Manager for Congressional Affairs
Joseph Emru
Program Officer, Middle East and North Africa
On Sunday, October 23, millions of Tunisians went to the polls for the country’s first elections since a popular uprising ousted authoritarian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January. The balloting, held to select a constituent assembly that will serve as a transitional legislature and draft a new constitution, has been widely hailed as free and fair.
Through its “Nchoof” project, Freedom House worked with a group of local nongovernmental organizations to enable ordinary Tunisians to serve as citizen monitors during the elections. Using a system set up by the project, Tunisians could send and receive critical information, including reports of electoral violations, in real time via voice calls, text or multimedia messaging, Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail.
Nchoof employed Ushahidi open-source crowd-sourcing technology to encourage civic awareness and citizen participation. The technology, originally developed in Kenya, has been used to collect citizen reports during elections and crisis situations in countries around the world, including in a previous Freedom House election-monitoring project in Egypt, and in other projects in Haiti, Mexico, and Lebanon.
The following photographs show the Tunisian elections as Freedom House staff experienced them. Click below to see the photos and the full gallery.
