© USIP 2014 • All rights reserved.

United States Institute of Peace • www.usip.org • Tel. 202.457.1700 • @USIP

UNITED STates institute of peace

“PakVotes became a valued, 

alternative source for news 

on Pakistan’s elections 

experience. #PakVotes was 

the dominant hashtag for 

general elections, trending for several days.”

April 11, 2014

PakVotes

A Social Media Experiment in Elections Monitoring

Nadia Naviwala

E-mail: nnaviwala@usip.org 

Twitter: @NadiaNavi

peaceBrieF171

Summary

•	 PakVotes, a pilot projectsupported by the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), used social media

platforms and a network of reporterslocated in areas outside of major citiesin Pakistan to

track violence during the 2013 elections.

•	 The project offerslessonsthat could guide future effortsto use social media to record and

publicize conflicts and the use of violence during elections and other major events.

•	 The hashtag #PakVotestrended forseveral days around elections,serving as a popular

alternative newssource to the mainstream media, which was not as diverse in its geographic

coverage,sources orstory types.

PakVotes: An Introduction

Social media have empowered citizensto function asreporters during major national events. Thanks

to smartphones and platformssuch as Facebook, Twitter andYouTube, citizens have been transformed from consumers of information to producers, and from victimsto witnesses.1

Yet the value of

citizen reporting is also questioned for itsreliability, itslimited reach in places where it is mostly elites

and urban populationsthat have smartphones and computers and itsreal-world impact.

The Twitter hashtag #PakVotes wasthe top trend associated with the May 2013 general electionsin Pakistan. But different from most trendsthat emerge on social media, this one waslinked

to a professionally-managed PakVotes Twitter handle, Facebook page, blog and online map. The

heart of the effort was a social media newsroom in Islamabad that received reportsfrom a network

of citizen reporters who were trained and equipped with Android smartphones and operated in

ten relatively offline, under-covered and conflict-prone districts of Pakistan. The PakVotesteam

systematically verified and shared information on its various platforms.

Based on lessonslearned from its work during the general elections, PakVotes fine-tuned and

re-ran the pilot during by-electionsthat were held on August 22. Those by-elections were held

to fillseats vacated by candidates who won more than one constituency or where the previous

results were rejected by the Election Commission. Thistime, citizen reporters were replaced with

professional reporters affiliated with local media outletsin each of the 41 constituencies where

by-elections were held.
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A Look at PakVotes

page 2 • PB 171 • April 11, 2014

Manage, Then Share

While the Pakistani nongovernmental organization Bytesfor All (B4A) was eager to use social

media toolsto improve the flow of information around elections, it acknowledged the vulnerabilities of citizen reporting and considered them in the PakVotes program’s design. Unlike mostsocial

media experiences, the PakVotes platform emphasized information management—in terms of its

sources, reliability and utility—oversimple information-sharing.

Due to technological and language barriersin Pakistan and many other countries, the urban,

English-speaking,smartphone-equipped elite can be overrepresented in the use ofsocial media

(especially Twitter).Yet the objective of PakVotes wasto use social media to bring news of developmentsin marginalized, typically offline areas of the country to the entire nation. By training and

equipping citizen reporters with Android smartphonesin such“information dark”areas, and linking

them to online platforms with national reach, PakVotes circumvented the elite and urban bias

characteristic ofsocial media use.

A recognized problem with citizen journalism isthe dissemination of unverified reports.During

elections,social media are particularly prone to manipulation by political parties, candidates and party

supporters.To control forthistendency, B4A trained its network ofreportersin ethical journalism,

social media ethics,2 information verification and safety.The centralteam in Islamabad performed

quality-control checks on information coming in from itsreporters.The centralteam ensured thatthe

reportsthat were ultimately shared were verified in person and through secondary sources.

With respect to information coming from othersocial media users, the central team employed

informal network analysis, based on itsfamiliarity with online personalities and ability to detect

paid-for versus authentic posts, in order to discern biases and credibility before re-posting. During

the second trial of PakVotes during the by-elections, mainstream media reports were also verified

by the ground network before being shared.

As a result of this high standard forsharing information, only 5.5 percent (111 of 2000) reports

from PakVotesreporters were, in effect, published during general elections. Replacing citizen

reporters with professional reportersin the subsequent by-electionsled to an increase in the

proportion of usable reportsto 33 percent (450 of 1359). 

A third challenge for the online information universe isrelevance and impact on offline, realworld events. To overcome this, PakVotesfocused on influencing the mainstream media, especially

domestic media. But the unanticipated popularity of PakVotesreports meant that major politicians,

media personalities and activists also started using #PakVotes. In future trials, thisreach could open

up new avenuesforshaping and instigating debate and demanding accountability and reform.

Finally, mixing activism and journalism and watchdogging electionsfrom a popular interface

like social media introduce the risk of over-representing problems and discrediting a processthat

may be generally free and fair. PakVotes not only controlled for this by emphasizing verified information but also by sharing positive as well as negative information. Alongside reports of conflict,

PakVotesran an“iVoted”campaign, promoting the exuberance around elections by sharing photos

submitted by voters with purple-inked thumbs. PakVotesreporters also investigated and corrected

rumors of conflict, often generated by party supporters who wanted to discredit results when they

feared that their candidate waslosing.

Value Added

According to Megan Reif, former assistant professor at the University of Colorado and author of

Making Democracy Safe: Institutional Causes and Consequences of Coercive Campaigning and Election 
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A Look at PakVotes

page 3 • PB 171 • April 11, 2014

Violence, outrage around incidents of electoral violence createsthe impetusfor reform. Electoral

processesin developing democracies are strengthened through cycles of violence and reform. For

example, the secret ballot wasintroduced in the United Statesin 1888 in response to vote-buying

and ballot-box stuffing by clerksin the pay of the Democratic political machine.3

Collecting information on violence and electoral violationsisthe firststep toward generating

the outrage necessary to stimulate reform. Information darknessrobs accountability and reform

processes of their first critical ingredient.

PakVotes was motivated by the concern that the mainstream media would neglect coverage

of eventsin parts of Pakistan outside of major urban areasthat are prone to conflict. True to that

concern, coverage in the mainstream press on Election Day focused on the major cities, especially

Karachi, where media houses are based, and gave scant attention to smaller, less-accessible areas.

For example, a survey of ten newspapers on Election Day, indicated no reports of incidents of

electoral violence from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. By contrast, Twitter and Facebook

were constantly streaming diverse reports of violence, violations and people’s experiences with

the electionsfrom areas not as well covered in the mainstream press.

Mainstream media in Pakistan, asin many places, also can reflect heavy editorial biases. Given

limited time and space, and the incentive to generate ratings, the mainstream commercial press

is bound to coversome types of violence more than others. According to Sami Khan of the Public

Policy Review Center in Islamabad, the mainstream media emphasize militant violence in the

general elections; hence, news about more conventional candidate- and party-driven electoral

violence was crowded out. At a lessons-learned event with PakVotes’professional reporters who

worked during by-elections,several expressed appreciation and excitement about having an

alternative avenue for reporting news,saying that only a fraction of what they see assmall-town

correspondents actually makesit into the press, especially at the mainstream level. They appreciated having a platform to report additional information, unfiltered by editors and producers.

PakVotes gave them a national platform through which to share their reporting.

For many users, PakVotesrepresented a clearinghouse for verified and neutral information.

According to a PakVotesreporter from Lodhran, Punjab, many people do not trust television

channels and local reporters, believing that they have political affiliationsthatslant their coverage.

They preferred the Facebook page as a directsource of unvarnished information and appreciated

the efforts of PakVotesreportersto aggressively collect and share citizen experiences.

There were numerousindicationsthat PakVotes became a valued, alternative source for news on

Pakistan’s elections experience. #PakVotes wasthe dominant hashtag for general elections, trending forseveral days before Twitter took it down. The BBC asked if it could draw on the #PakVotes

network of reporters. Al Jazeera live-streamed #PakVotestweets on its website. When international

reporters had a question for Pakistanis on elections, they used the hashtag #PakVotes.

On the day of general elections, #PakVotes got 13,324 tweetsfrom 5,251 unique users, which

were viewed 12.17 million times. The hashtag averaged 60 tweets per minute. Between Facebook

and Twitter, PakVotesreceived an average of 150 reports of incidentsfrom citizens per day.

Lessons Learned

Through two trials, PakVotes haslearned several important lessonsto maximize the utility ofsocial

media toolsfor managing and sharing information. These are:

•	 Use professional reporters instead of citizen reporters. Professional reporters know

how to investigate, report and verify information. They also have strong local networks.
© USIP 2014 • All rights reserved.

A Look at PakVotes

page 4 • PB 171 • April 11, 2014

Simply by shifting from citizen reporters to professional reporters, PakVotes increased

the proportion of usable reports from 5.5 percent to 33 percent.

•	 Video goes viral. Equipping reporters with camera-enabled smartphones was critical

to capturing video. More than text posts and photos, videos received the most views on

social media and were most likely to be picked up by television channels.

•	 Partner with domestic media. Earlier USIP research has found that while social media

is popular with the international media, domestic media is more influential in shaping

national opinion and events. During by-elections, PakVotes tried to strengthen coordination with a major media outlet but encountered some hesitation, perhaps because

PakVotes was seen as a competitor for stories and opinion contributors. However, after

by-elections, when PakVotes had gained in popularity, another major media group approached it to establish a formal relationship.

•	 Use opinion blogs to generate analysis, a Board of Advisors to engage Twitterati

and cartoons to attract popular interest. PakVotes was a multi-pronged effort that

engaged social media users at several levels. The team employed a popular political

cartoonist, whose cartoons went viral in the run-up to elections. It also paid nominal

amounts to young commentators to contribute analysis and commentary to their

blog—drawing traffic and followership to the initiative. Perhaps most important, PakVotes was able to attract well-known Twitterati and online activists to an informal Board

of Advisors that met in person. This buy-in strengthened the credibility and popularity

of PakVotes.

•	 Use SMS. A well-advertised SMS short code linked to the central team is critical to enable citizens without smartphones and computers to report information as well. 

•	 Bridge online and offline communities through two-way interaction. Shahab

Siddiqi, a PakVotes team member, points out,“We were successful in terms of getting

information, but we were less effective in giving information back to communities. The

gap of information from offline communities to the online world was bridged, but not

the reverse. Just as PakVotes had live people in the field reporting information, a future

initiative should have a dedicated network sharing information back out.” To strengthen

two-way interaction in the by-elections phase of the pilot project, PakVotes reporters

doubled as community mobilizers. For example, PakVotes reporters exposed Taliban

pamphlets in Hangu that declared democracy un-Islamic and threatened to kill“anyone

who enters polling stations,” especially women, and to bomb polling stations. The letter

suppressed turnout. In response, the police deployed heavy security to polling stations

and the reporters then used their networks in the community to encourage people to

vote. Anne Nelson, an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University and specialist

in new media in development communications, suggests that in a future trial, online

information can also be shared with communities over radio.

In sum, PakVotes has demonstrated how social media can be used to diversify the flow of

reliable information about electionsthrough an organized network of professional reporters

that is managed by a central team. Through two trials, the pilot project attempted to correct for

the vulnerabilities ofsocial media that occur when they are used sporadically by citizens during

major national events. The potential for an information clearinghouse like PakVotesisto move

offline and to influence mainstream audiences. Once seeded,such networks can be sustained if

reporters are allowed to keep their phones and if their popularity and use among citizens grow

through repeated use in national events. Thistool could also be used to track other issues on an

ongoing basis,such asthe performance of elected leaders(“PakGoverns”), or it could be deployed
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USIP provides the analysis, training and 

tools that prevent and end conflicts, 

promotes stability and professionalizes 

the field of peacebuilding.

For media inquiries, contact the office 

of Public Affairs and Communications, 

202.429.4725

A Look at PakVotes

page 5 • PB 171 • April 11, 2014

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in national crises,such as earthquakes, floods and wars. B4A has already received requeststo help

citizen groupsin Bangladesh, India and Cameroon to develop similar tools, and it wasreplicated

during the April 5, 2014, Afghan elections. Social media have weaknesses, to be sure, but the

PakVotes experience suggeststhey have a bright future astoolsto engage the public on major

national events.

Notes

1.	 Bahador, B., and Tng, S. (2010). The changing role of the citizen in conflict reporting. Pacific Journalism Review, 16(2): 178-194. See www.pjreview.info/articles/

changing-role-citizen-conflict-reporting-553.

2.	 PakVotes published a Social Media Code of Conduct in 2013 that was vetted and approved by

Aidan White, director of the Ethical Journalism Network, and praised by Dawn Media Group

Editor Mubashir Zaidi, among others.

3.	 Reif, Megan. 2009. Making Democracy Safe: Institutional Causes and Consequences of

Election Coercion and Violence. Introduction. Unpublished draft. University of Michigan

Department of Political Science, Ann Arbor, MI. See www.sitemaker.umich.edu/megan.reif/

dissertation_summary.

About This Brief

During Pakistan’s May 2013 

general elections and by-elections 

three months later, USIP supported 

an experiment called PakVotes, 

designed by the Pakistani nongovernmental organization Bytes 

for All (B4A) to increase the flow 

of information from “information 

dark” areas through a network of 

social media reporters. Information 

darkness referred to districts of 

Pakistan that are relatively remote, 

offline, conflict-prone and do 

not receive regular coverage by 

mainstream media. The pilot 

project was designed to correct for 

commonly identified vulnerabilities 

of social media reporting during 

major national events, particularly elections. This Peace Brief 

assesses the PakVotes experiment 

and suggests how it might provide 

a model for using social media to 

diversify and improve the quality of information around major 

national events. Nadia Naviwala is 

USIP’s country representative for 

Pakistan. She leads USIP’s Peace 

Innovations Fund for Pakistan and 

peaceful elections programming.