Population as Auditor of an Election Process in Honduras: The Case of the VotoSocial Crowdsourcing Platform

For a country to become fully democratic, the majority of the population needs to be involved in the politics of that country. This requires people to be aware of what is happening, and to be able to participate in the country's political processes. VotoSocial is a crowdsourcing system launched during the 2013 Honduran government elections. It retrieved the official polling table records in digitized form from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (the Government's elections authority) and provided them to the Internet community to be counted and the digitizations verified. VotoSocial was thereby able to verify the accuracy of the official polling results. We found no evidence of fraud in the digitization process, but statistical analysis revealed a data behavior usually associated with incremental fraud in an electoral process. VotoSocial shows that social media-powered crowdsourcing systems can increase a population's political awareness during elections, thus providing a motive to build similar platforms in other countries with political systems marked by electoral fraud.