Volunteers, Technology Are Powerful Even Under Autocratic Systems; Freeman Chari Reflects On 2023 Elections

United States-based Zimbabwean software engineer Freeman Chari says their work during the August 2023 general elections shows that volunteers and the use of technology have power even under “challenging autocratic systems.”

Posting on X, Chari said his team of volunteers, CredibleVote, was able to deploy Meshtastic repeaters across the country to cover areas without a network which enabled them to receive and validate results from 10500 polling stations in the first 48 hours after the elections. Wrote Chari:

The highlight of the past election was how technology disrupted ZANU PF’s rigging strategy. They used ZANU PF’s member register to move those who were not their members from their traditional polling stations in cities. They gerrymandered the electoral maps and then created double candidates.

In every step, [Team Pachedu] followed them and highlighted these discrepancies and pointed out areas of focus.

[ZEC] refused with the voters’ roll. People didn’t know where to vote and the double candidates made it so they don’t know who to vote for.

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A week before elections we released CredibleVote Bots on Whatsapp and Android which completely disrupted the ZEC-ZANU plan.

487 000 people checked where and who to vote for in 5 days and 84% of these were in Hre, 10% in Byo. By our calculation, CCC would have potentially lost 32 seats without this.

On election day, CredibleVote had 2 war rooms. One in Mashonaland & the other in Matabeleland far away cities powered by satellite internet.

We deployed Meshtastic repeaters across the country to cover areas without a network. The maximum range we got was 53km but repeaters made it so we could get results from 150km away. We also had MQTT servers that relayed this info to our result servers.

All this work was done by volunteers outside of CCC. The only thing we asked of CCC was that they should have polling agents at every polling station.

Then the issue of resources came up. We again built the #Mazizi platform to crowdsource from supporters & which raised $105K which was minuscule compared to the need.

This setup was novel and it was a culmination of 2yrs of planning, coding & deployment by people who didn’t have a stake in CCC. I believe ZANU PF & the State machinery never knew about our work.

They raided ZESN probably after the noise by [Team Pachedu] about Mandla. That did not affect the Crediblevote work at all.

Results were coming in from our network, from CCC agents and we also opened a crowd platform for anyone to send V11. In the backend, we were using computer vision & language models to read V11s and sort them. There were 3 tiers of validation. Our roving agents had the highest trust, then CCC agents, then the crowd.

In the first 48 hours after the elections, we received and validated results from 10500 polling stations. We got a further 1600 from CCC as some agents chose to hand deliver their V11 etc…

I had a meeting with Nelson Chamisa & presented him with what we had. We had close to 350 V11s from Mash East and West which had no stamps and the agents were saying ZEC had said they didn’t have stamps but ZANU PF agents were bringing stamped V11 pointing to conniving with ZEC.

NC said we should wait for ZEC to release their results. Unlike in 2018, ZEC chose to not release their results from each polling station.

They used brute force to ram unsubstantiated numbers to people. The responsibility of a credible election lies on the electoral board and nobody else.

We had a debate as to whether we should just release all the ~12100 results we had or not. The SADC report came out and it became clear that the most logical thing to do was reject the whole process & all results given the irregularities that SADC also acknowledged. I was shocked & distraught when folks chose to go to parliament.

In the end, I think the gun prevailed as it always temporarily does. What we showed is that no process run by the military can ever wield a product that represents the will of the people.

I have written this to highlight the power of volunteers, technology and commitment in challenging autocratic systems. I hope in the future others will build on top of our work. I wish I could thank all the volunteers by name but you know yourselves.

More: Pindula News