By
Jessica Weiss
A new website is helping Ghana's
citizens find their nearest voter registration center, so that they can be sure
they are eligible to vote in the 2016 general election.
GotToVote!, which is
optimized for mobile devices, explains who is eligible to register for the 2016
general elections in Ghana and gives a simple overview of the voter
registration process. It tells users what documentation to take with them to
register and helps them find their nearest voter registration center.
Much of this information is available
elsewhere, but is “a miss-mash of PDFs, MS Word or MS Excel documents, along
with CSVs ... [from a] variety of different ministry or other official
websites,” according to a statement on the GotToVote!
Ghana website. Because voting registration is delegated to districts in Ghana,
there is no single, national standard for who is an eligible voter.
The site is the latest iteration of the
GotToVote! model that’s been used successfully since 2013 in the lead-up to
elections in Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
The first GotToVote! site was built at
virtually zero cost as a Code for Kenya data journalism experiment ahead
of Kenya's 2013 general election. It was built in response to the fact that
Kenyan citizens were struggling to find the locations of their polling
stations.
Code for Kenya was a pilot program
funded by the Africa Media Initiative (AMI) and the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC). ANIC and Code for
Kenya are part of media innovator Justin Arenstein's ICFJ Knight International
Journalism Fellowship.
Code for Kenya embedded four Data Fellows into major
Kenyan newsrooms and a civil society organization for five months to help
kickstart experimentation with data-driven civic engagement tools. Its success
sparked the launch of Code for South Africa in early 2014, and now the
new Code for Ghana and Code for Nigeria initiatives.
In partnership with Code for Ghana,
GotToVote! Ghana was built in just two days by grassroots social justice
watchdog organization Odekro and the continental open data and open
government incubator, Code for Africa. The partners are now campaigning
to get potential voters in Ghana to use the site.
To help people find the website, the
online campaign is using the #GotToVote hashtag on
Twitter and Facebook.
Future versions of the site will
introduce SMS tools, and will help users verify their registration, find their
balloting stations and track their local election results.
All the cleaned-up data and source
materials used to power the GotToVote! Ghana website are available,
free-of-charge, for reuse.
According to the site: “Code for Africa
and its partners hate seeing civil society or anyone else being duped into
wasting money unnecessarily on inappropriate technology or predatory
consultancies.”
Jessica Weiss is a
freelance journalist based in Colombia.
Global media innovation content related
to the projects and partners of the Knight Fellowships on IJNet is supported by
the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and edited
by Jennifer Dorroh.
Photo from Ghana's 2008 elections
courtesy of Peter Lewenstein with a
Creative Commons license.
Source: Ijnet.org
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