 Good morning, test, test again. The mic is working perfect. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. My name is Jonas, Jonas Klaas. I'm USIP's team lead on election violence prevention. My colleagues and I are really thrilled today to present the findings from a new study on what work to prevent election violence, what works and what doesn't work. Drawing from our research on the recent elections 2017 elections in Kenya and Liberia. I want to thank our local partners who traveled here from Kenya and Liberia as well as Income Worciskowski who led our data analysis and a special thanks as well to Pat Merleau from NDI and JT from IRI who will be providing some comments after the initial presentations. I will briefly describe USIP's role in election violence prevention and also introduce the key findings from our study. If we can start the slides, maybe if I click here. Very good. So as you know, election violence can take many shapes. There have been recent election violence. I'm sure if you follow Afghanistan, if you're looking at the upcoming elections in Democratic Republic of the Congo, several other elections, then even before the elections, violence can get in their way in many different forms. You can see the destruction of campaign and voting materials, the intimidation of opposition supporters, crackdowns on peaceful protestors, the assassination of candidates, or even mass killings in some rare instances. And most organizations that work on elections, they do great work in trying to promote the integrity and the credibility of the electoral process. Now USIP takes a slightly different angle to elections, a conflict angle as we work to prevent these types of violence from occurring through research, through training and prevention in the field. Now in the coming five months, elections in the DRC, in Bangladesh and in Nigeria, they are particularly high on our radar given the likelihood of election violence. But prevention needs to start much earlier. That is why we created the election wire with news analysis and a calendar of elections at risk of conflict. The idea is to place elections on people's radar much earlier, including on our radar, so we can start our own programming on time, since most election violence happens before election day. So as that day approaches, the window of opportunity for effective prevention will close rapidly. So I invite you all to sign up. If you haven't done so already, it can be done online at usip.org to receive the online election wire. So now on to our study. The primary motivation behind the research that we conducted was to make election violence prevention more effective the way we use IP, the election violence prevention, but also our closest partners, USAID, UNDP, the State Department, RI, NDI, those people that we work with very closely, they often stress the need for prioritization. But as budgets get tighter, we can always adopt multi-layered prevention strategies, meaning we throw different strands of prevention activity at election and hope one of them will stick. So in order to be a bit more effective, we are trying to advocate for strategic prevention that really looks at the election type, the risk type in a given election. Two years ago, USIP published the book, Electing Peace. We saw that investments were made in many different tools to prevent election violence and to ensure that elections are both credible and peaceful, youth engagement, election administration, police training, civic education, just to name a few. We evaluated eight commonly used instruments to prevent election violence across five countries in Electing Peace. And each approach has its own logic about the anticipated change and the distinct mechanism through which risk would be reduced. And I will briefly walk you through three approaches that were included as part of our research. Each of these are considered to affect certain attitudes and behaviors, as well as structures that can either directly or indirectly help mitigate the risk of election violence. With security sector engagement, we try to look at the presence of security forces at key election events. We look at the external support that they receive as well as the existing regulatory frameworks that are in place and that shape the police presence and their activities during elections. So more concretely, election security requires a presence at the polls, a clear security protocol, as well as a police force that obtains the necessary training and capacity, and that engages at the community level with the electorate. With election administration, that is another broad bucket. With this, we look at the work of an election commission, the election laws that are in place, as well as the technical assistance that the election commission received. So it's not just the engagement of the police force or of the election commission, but also the international support that they often receive. More concretely, in the case of election administration, an election commission could theoretically mitigate risk by convening political parties to dispel myths and to exchange information, or they can determine clear rules about the announcement of results. This conflict mitigating or violence mitigating effect is often indirectly through the enhanced integrity of the electoral process. Election observation, the theorized effect here, is also indirect, so as violence reduction can be achieved through the deterring or legitimizing presence of an observation mission, their ability to report on relevant incidents, or by instigating certain structural reforms through their observation reports. I won't discuss the other instruments that we looked at just for the sake of time, we can go into that throughout this conversation. Now, our new study, it builds upon electing peace, but uses a very different methodology to figure out which approaches were best to prevent election violence and which don't. This time, looking at last year's elections in Liberia and Kenya, we combined traditional research techniques with M&E approaches, so monitoring and evaluation. Our local partners, they conducted around 2000s survey interviews, as well as nationwide interviews with long-term election observers, and we pretty much tried to measure three different things, the scope of violence, the scope and quality of seven different election instruments, as well as changes in behavior that we would expect if prevention does what it's supposed to do. So this approach allows us to evaluate entire practice areas instead of individual projects. These are practice evaluations, not project evaluations. It examines the collective impact that both domestic and international actors provide. They are engaged in a certain prevention approach. So let me give an example, if both a local radio station and a UN peacekeeping operations try to engage in peace messaging, often they try to change the same types of attitudes, try to achieve the same results at times. So it doesn't always make sense to isolate the independent impact of one versus the other, unless the evaluation is done for self-justification purposes, which is often the case. Prevention may occur and violence may be absence, but if the expected change in attitudes and behavior does not take place in the middle, then we should not claim success for that specific instrument. Our study helps reflect about expectations we have about certain instruments as well. Like for example, election observation. The instrument may do a lot of great things. It can help establish credibility, but perhaps we should not expect election observation to help reduce violence levels as well. It's something that it wasn't initially designed to do, but there are certain expectations about election observations. And I think those expectations are growing. So we should perhaps reconsider some of those expectations. Why did we pick Kenya and Liberia? Both countries have faced significant levels of political instability in their recent history, and for various reasons both elections in 2017 were considered at risk of violence when we made our country selection. In Liberia, the UN peacekeeping mission was pulling out. There were serious capacity gaps both within the police and within the National Election Commission. And there was no clear successor for President Elim Sirleaf at that time. Uncertainty about a future candidate and about who will be succeeding always creates some level of anxiety and tension that that's normal elections worldwide. In Kenya, the risk was much higher. The country has a history of election violence and was facing a large and very complicated election. Our guests will elaborate on that in much more detail. The Kenya elections were, in my view, quite violent. 37% of our respondents reported violence in their sublocations, sublocations that we selected. Agreed the violence did not reach the level of 2007-2008, but in my humble opinion that's a very low threshold for success. In Liberia, the elections were quite peaceful despite fears of violence in the run-up. Only about 8% of respondents reported isolated incidents in Liberia. So to wrap things up, what about the effectiveness of prevention? Three things I would really like you to walk away with today. First, we've got some good indication that prevention works. It can reduce election violence through the anticipated changes in attitude and behavior, particularly high-quality election administration and responsible, well-equipped police. Those routes seem to offer the best promise to peaceful elections based on our findings. But not every prevention approach is equally promising. There's no evidence suggesting that peace messaging and voter consultations made a difference in 2017 in Kenya and Liberia. Some prevention approaches work in one country, but not the other, which makes sense. I think this has to do with differences in context and risk type, but it also has to do with variation implementation quality. For more background and analysis on this, I will introduce my team members. All three of them played a very instrumental role in the research behind our report, which was put out here at the entrance. We'll start with Inkin from Borzyskowsky. She's an assistant professor at Florida State University. And as I mentioned, she led the data analysis for this initiative. Next up will be Joshua Czangwoni. He is the deputy executive secretary of the Constitution and Reform Education Consortium. Glad I got that acronym right. Also known as Krakow in Kenya. And Krakow, I think it's good to know, also serves as the core member of Kenya's election observation group. And finally, we'll invite Oscar Blow to the stage. He is the chairman of the Elections Coordination Committee in Liberia and director of the Center for Democratic Governance. Following their presentations, we'll take some time for Q&A. And after that, my colleague, Debbie Leung-Fenton, will facilitate a conversation with Pat Merlot from the National Democratic Institute and John Tomachevsky of JT from the International Republican Institute about the effectiveness of some of these instruments. Full bios are made available, so Inkin, the floor is yours. So thank you, Janos, for the great introduction to the project. And thank you all for coming here on a Monday morning to discuss our findings with us. It's really nice, and we look forward to the feedback and the engagement. So I will talk about methodology or how we actually went about testing what works and what didn't in preventing election violence, how we went about these and what the sort of big picture findings are and recommendations that come out from the report. So in each of the counties in Kenya and Liberia, we selected four to five counties for our study. And we selected these four or five counties that were the priority for those counties that have a larger population and more voters because much research indicates that election violence tends to still be more common in more densely populated areas. And then we also selected countries that have variation in competition and partisanship and in geography. And that is essentially to assure that some of the findings that we have for those conflict-driven areas are also going to be generalizable to the rest of the country and don't just speak to one particular part or one particular political affiliation in the country. And then within the counties that we selected, we had a total of 150 towns, which is the equivalent of communities in Liberia and in sublocations in Kenya. And those 150 towns total, so 300 in total for Kenya and Liberia together, we selected for three criteria. The conflict history of the town, the population, and the number of voters similar to the one above because election violence tends to be more common in densely populated areas. And the connectedness. So how easy these areas, these sublocations, and communities were to reach. And we selected those three dimensions or these three aspects because as you probably know all better than I do, budgets are tight. And even though you might want to do programming all around in many different towns and communities in the country, you essentially have to select where you go and where you don't go. And so in reflecting on this question of where programming for preventing election violence is more likely and talking to other practitioners, we essentially settled on these three criteria of population density, conflict history. And whoops. What did I do? Oh no. Okay. So this is going to be interesting. No slides. And maybe someone in back can fix the bad news. Thank you. Excellent. Very good. And connectedness. So we have 150 towns in each Kenya and Liberia. And then in these 150 towns, we did the survey of the local respondents. So for the survey, we tried to capture three things as Janos already mentioned, the scope and quality of prevention for electoral violence, the scope and quality of election violence, and then attitudes of the local population. And in particular, we were interested in changes and attitudes. So if certain prevention works and there's associated theories of change, then we would expect that attitudes of the respondents should change in line with these theories of change. And so we wanted to have two time points, right, where we measure the attitudes and then see if those actually change. And so we had a baseline and an end line survey. One was before the first round, before the election, and then the end line survey was after the repeat or the runoff election. And so we talked to the same respondents, and we tried to get back to many of the respondents from the first round. It actually worked quite well in the two countries. And then in effect, we had 1,000 respondents in each Kenya and Liberia. So these were seven respondents in each of the 150 towns. So we tried to get community representatives. We had community elders, civil society leaders, women's leaders, youth representatives, teachers, local cab drivers, all sort of people who might be informed about what's going on in the community and can speak to the different types of programming that they have experienced and different types of electoral violence as well. Just to give you an impression of how this looks. So this is the example of Liberia. We selected four counties and those are Lofa, Bong, Nimba, and then Montserratto with Monrovia as the capital city. So those are the counties. And then within those we have the total of 150 locations. And then we have, following the survey, a very rich data set, right, on these different types of prevention on election violence and on the different mechanisms as well on the changes in attitudes. So as Janos mentioned, there are several types of election violence that we try to capture and ask about. Those include property damage, intimidation, but also killings and injuries, anything like a very broad spectrum of election violence that we can capture. Because as we mentioned, the risk of violence in Kenya was much higher than in Liberia, so we wanted to make sure we can also capture variation on the low end of election violence. So we have information on the outcome that we intend to explain election violence. We have information on these seven prevention instruments, which Janos already mentioned. And we have also some information about the context in which these interviews take place because it might be that characteristics of an individual, like gender or age, a particular role in the community or the characteristics of the interview, if this happened in a group where other people are listening in or if it's a private interview or even characteristics of the town sort of influence the answers in those interviews. And so we collected this information as well. And then I wanted to give you a little bit of like a snapshot of what this actually looks like. And this might be too small for the people in the back, but I'll try to narrate a little bit what we did here. So on the left hand side, you essentially see the breakdown or the prevalence of the different prevention instruments that we had. And you see the seven different types, the darker colors are for Liberia and the light gray colors are for Kenya. And what you see here is essentially how many respondents said that this was something they noticed in their own communities. So for example, police presence, so the official of security officials in the communities, about 90 plus percent of respondents reported, yes, at election events in our local communities, there were security officials present. Whereas other things like piece messaging, for example, only about 60 percent said there were distinct efforts in the local community to engage in this kind of dimension. And then on the left hand side, you see the breakdown of election violence. And the very bottom of that, which it probably is really too small to read, is the information that Jonas mentioned briefly that 37 percent of the respondents in Kenya reported election violence in their local communities in Liberia. It was much less just about 9 percent. And the lion share of that, just the statistic further up, is excessive use of violence by police. So in reacting to outbreaks and unrest and protest, it was sort of the big share of violence that happened. Other things, intimidation, property damage, riots happened as well. But police force was the major type of election violence that we had. All right. And then we essentially analyzed this information with regression analysis, which I can go into more detail, but I'm not sure people are really thrilled about this. Anyways, and so we had findings and the major findings Jonas already flagged. So there's two types of prevention that seem to have worked. And that is security sector engagement and election administration. These two types of prevention both influenced attitudes of the local population in the way that is often hypothesized, improved attitudes, improved trust in institutions. And they were also linked to less election violence on the ground. So for us, this indicates with these two pieces of information that these two instruments, security sector engagement and election administration seem to have worked. Then there's two other instruments that we did not find empirical evidence of their effectiveness. And that is peace messaging and voter consultation because in our analysis, they were linked to neither changes in attitudes, nor election violence the way we would have expected it. And then we're sort of a third set of things where we have mixed findings. And those are for three instruments, which is youth programming, voter education, and election monitoring. I'll say a bit more about this in a second. So for what seemed to work, the major finding here is security sector engagement and election administration. And in particular, what we found is that security sector engagement not just necessarily being present and having more people on the ground, but the quality of the engagement with the local community. The conversation and the dialogue with the local community really helped to improve attitudes, to improve trust in the police and trust in the election officials. And that that sort of engagement was also linked to less election violence on the ground. At the same time, of course, it must be said that the role of the police, as I'm sure my colleague Joshua and also Oscar will highlight, is often quite contested. And at the same time, where good engagement by security officials can potentially lead to less election violence, negative engagement by security officials can also often be a reason for more election violence. So we can also flip the finding around, if you will. And then second, election administration on the quality of election administration, particularly the preparedness of the election management body in the registration process, in the voting process, in the counting process, was highlighted as one that was really important for changing positively the attitudes of local population towards election credibility, election quality and trust in the electoral process. And that was linked to less election violence on the ground. The second set of factors that we found no evidence for actually working is peace messaging and voter consultation. So here we did not observe impact or empirical support. And digging more into why this is, why this might be the case, what we found is that for peace messaging, peace messaging in both countries seemed to really struggle to reach the target population. So many people locally reported that they heard about peace messaging, but oftentimes those that were most at risk of actually engaging in election violence were not reached. And so that might be one important challenge in further implementing these in the future. And then secondly, voter consultation is something that also many voters reported, that they talk to their representative and then they engage with their representatives, but they didn't actually make them feel like they were better represented. So there seems to be a gap between the process of talking to voters and locals and actually making them feel like their grievances and their needs are heard and implemented by their representatives. And then lastly, as I mentioned, there are sort of mixed findings for a few of those. So for youth programming and civic education, these seem to make a difference in Liberia, but not in Kenya. So there's some evidence that in Liberia, these types of programming actually were linked to improved attitudes and less election violence, but not in Kenya. And again, digging more into this, it seems like the programming quality, so the quality of the implementation was done better in Liberia in some cases than in Kenya because the programming here, in particular, regard to youth programming and voter education, reached more people regardless of their age, of their gender and of their wealth. And so it seemed to be more inclusive in Liberia than it was in Kenya. And then lastly, for election monitoring, we find that it is promising and that it helps improve some attitudes and the local population, when they have more experience with monitoring in their local communities, actually has higher faith and higher trust and higher credibility in election monitors being able to reduce not just fraud, but also election violence. But we didn't find empirical evidence that this, in fact, happened on the ground. So that's why it's sort of a limited effectiveness finding. And then this gets me to the recommendations. So clearly the biggest recommendation that comes out of this is the two things that we found empirical support for, election commission and policing. There should be greater engagement in those sets of instruments and maybe more investment in those sorts of improvements. Secondly, the programming we think could be more assessment-based. So in the sense of having risk assessments much earlier on and maybe on which types of risks, which types of election violence risks are on the ground and which types of programming might help with those particular risks are an important step forward in the future. And then from these mixed findings that we had, there's two important insights. The first one is improved participant recruitment. So making the programming more inclusive, either to really bring all the people of the local community into this conversation or alternatively, to deliberately target that part of the population that might be most vulnerable or most at risk, to try to speak more to that section. And then lastly, inclusive targeted and locally led programming because there's not just international organizations obviously engaged in many of these activities, but there's great regional and sub-regional bodies who have the access, the knowledge and the know-how to implement many of these programs on the ground. All right. So with that, I will give it to Droshua and Oscar, who will give you a lot more detail information about the respective countries. Good morning, everyone. Yeah. My name is Joshua Changwon. I come from Kenya and I work with the Constitutional Reform Education Consortium, CRECO. Allow me to make the following introductions. The Constitutional Reform Education Consortium CRECO is a consortium of civil society organizations based in Kenya. And we've been in the business of election monitoring and observation from the year 1998. So from the year 2012, we've been partners with the United States Institute of Peace, carrying out a research on prevention of electoral violence, as well as also engaging electoral bodies on measures to make elections peaceful. We were lucky in 2017 to carry, to be part of this research as we've been presented by Professor Inken. And today I'm here to affirm and give examples of some of the findings as to what worked, what did not work. And I think in addition to the introduction of CRECO is that CRECO is the chairperson of the elections observation group, which is a consortium and network of civil society organizations and faith-based organizations that are charged with the mandate of observing and monitoring elections in Kenya. And it was founded in the year 2010. So in 2017, Kenya had a general election, which results were contested in the Supreme Court. And there was a call for a repeat. So generally we had like two elections in the same year. So I'm going to present the following observations that the level of risks and violence, you know, began, it was moderate, then went high. And this was a result of, you know, in Kenya elections is, I mean, the formula that we have there is the winner takes it all. So elections is a matter of life and death. It's very competitive, expensive for both candidates and the state in terms of, you know, funding, the administration and management of it, because we have six elective positions and the election is done on the same day. So there are various forms of, you know, witnessed, you know, currencies of violence, including electoral gender-based violence, where women candidates as well as also women voters face, you know, the wrath of, you know, the male counterparts. Okay, thank you so much. I think literally, okay, thank you so much. So there are quite a number of, you know, other witnessed, you know, currencies. You could also take the form of ethnicity, because the way politicians mobilize the population there is, you know, they want to see, you know, the vulcanization of the society along the tribal lines. So that is how mobilization is done there. In as much as against the law, against the constitution of our country, but it's much easier because since we got independence, that is how, you know, the tribes and the ethnic groups would, you know, put together themselves and mobilize, you know, to ascend to power. Of reason, we've had, you know, the uprisings from extremist groups. A good example is the Alishaba. They take advantage of the situations where, you know, citizens are being mobilized into crowds of political rallies and they want to scare or try to, you know, exert attacks on the people. So, and of course, that becomes a form of violence and of course, the country's a lot all the time as it's a form of a risk, a situation in our country. Then results generally, I mean, election results generally in our country has always been contested. There's been this narrative where those ones who've lost would always want to to reject the results and contest and say probably it was not free and fair. In as much as even if it was a straightforward, transparent, accountable, whether it is for a particular seat, they would always want to show and say that probably I was not defeated, you know, and they create this narrative to say let's mobilize ourselves and be against those ones who've won elections. Then we've had also a contestation where they've been, of course, as people refuse, you know, the results of the elections, they form a court of public opinion and say we are not going to the court of law. We want to do mass action. We want to go to the streets and mobilize ourselves and probably make some political statements against the ruling or the pronouncement of the Electoral Commission. But slowly by slowly, I think with the constitution of Kenya 2010, we've had an empress of, you know, addressing some of these issues through the courts of law, which has brought stability. And I'll be illustrating as how the Supreme Court of Kenya, you know, annulled the presidential results and called for a repeat election. Then the institutions of governance, those ones that are mandated and charged to administration and management of elections, and for this case is the Electoral Commission, certain decisions they make as always face the attack by politicians by making certain statements, including also our judiciary. And of course this causes tension, you know, fluctuates, you know, from time to time as per the pronouncement of the politicians. Then the excessive use of the police, yes, in as much as the presence of the police is there, unlike in previous elections, but they are present probably in terms of handling the situations like crowd management sometimes could result in making them use excessive force. Then we are also a situation where after the Supreme Court ruling of saying that we repeat the election, the presidential elections, the opposition will be quoted the repeat and it caused a lot of tension, you know, because the supporters would be confused and did not know what to do. And of course the repeat election just proceeded, minus the participation of, you know, the major opposition political party. As a result of interacting with this work, the research, we affirm that the following work, it might not necessarily be, have been a hundred percent, the police units, unlike previous elections, were generally prepared for the 2017 elections in Kenya. And I think even the deployment was double, the deployment was double. We had about 1,000, 180,000 police officers being deployed, you know, to maintain law and order and safeguard the electoral environment. As opposed to previous elections where probably the police were on the periphery, we are not prepared maybe through training allocation of resources and equipment and being assigned, you know, to duty over supporting the electoral commission in the management and administration of elections. But this was not without limitations. When there were certain decisions that were made by the electoral commission, especially the decisions made by opposition parties to conduct demonstrations, the police would use excessive force and this resulted to loss of life as well as also destruction of property. So in as much as there was merit in terms of, you know, the deployment in terms of numbers and being assigned to duty, it came also with consequences because they were overwhelmed in terms of managing crowds. Then we think that domestic election monitoring also contributed to reducing crowd by fiscal presence, making reports, statements, but we, I mean, in terms of reducing the electoral violence, cannot be ascertained as there were also victims of the violence. Like for example, during the repeat of the presidential elections, elections observation group, we were not able to deploy our election observers in more than 10 counties because they were proved to be very insecure for observers and all. So we're also victims of the violence, but in terms of guaranteeing, you know, presence where the environment is conducive for deployment would deter a fraud or, you know, occurrence of animal practice that would be there that could probably result to violence. What did not work? I think the diminutive faith in terms of the performance of the electoral commission where the work was to manage and administrate the elections, I mean, the loss of that faith, I mean, the diminished faith would result to people wanting to seek justice or question certain items. For instance, we were supposed to inspect, I mean, the electoral commission was supposed to present the voter's register for inspection where voters would present themselves and check their details in the voter's register. But of course, because of time constraints, do not present an opportunity for the electoral commission to inspect the voter's register. And people who are in anxiety, this result in the building of tension, because people do not know whether their names are there or not and that kind of stuff, then the invalidation of the Supreme Court presidential results, I mean, this reduced the faith. People do not have to believe anymore to say the electoral commission would conduct a free and fair repeat elections. And we saw also resignation of some of the commissioners of the electoral commission, some of them fleeing the country at that time. We saw some of the senior electoral commission officials being assassinated. It's on record and I think it's been captured in our report. So such happenings in the electoral commission would reduce and probably make people and voters and practitioners of elections not believe that probably they would do a good job and resulted into tension. Then there was no systematic evidence that peace messaging and voter consolidation made a difference in the 2017 elections because I mean, the way our political party primaries are conducted, you know, political parties are more of like outfits which are being supported by certain individuals. I mean, the institutionalization and management of political parties has not been entrenched in our country as such that there is belief that the nominees that represents those political parties have gone through a free and fair process until it guarantees a situation where people will want to say that the people that we've heard from a certain political party are people who are genuinely elected by the political party members. I think in our constitution it provides for independent candidates. If you see the participation of candidates of 2017 general elections in our country, there were record majority numbers of people who went to be independent candidates as opposed to being sponsored by the political party tickets. So the unfairness in terms of the political party practice in nominations is a characteristic that probably it can culminate and create tension in terms of the pre-election period in our general elections. Then the peace messaging, it really struggles to reach to the right people because the timeliness sometimes is very late. It's reduced to TV adverts. The voters would want to listen more to politicians and politicians do not necessarily convey peace messages. They convey messages that are more biased towards their ascending to power. It could be also in the form of fake news or propaganda, but you know the environment does know it's actually limiting in terms of making the voters consume peace measures and doing the right thing. But I mean generally the political environment at that time is very complex even for peace messaging to happen. Our youth, if you've read most literature and books or reports from the year 2007, the youth were used for political, they were manipulated for political gain by the politicians to cause destruction, to mobilize themselves against the opponents. And I remember in 2013 during the political presidential political campaign our constitution provides for if there's no more than 50 percent, I mean number of votes, there will be a call for a repeat for let's say the top two contenders. And there were promises that this budget that we've given for the repeat elections, if you, the youth, can give us this mandate, we'll get all the whole of that budget and we'll give it to you. So it's politicized. I mean so there's no meaningful engagement by the, so whichever programs that you bring and you make the youth to engage meaningfully in the electoral process, it does not really make a lot of effort in terms of guaranteeing peace because they are there. It just requires a trigger and they are there to suit the political situation out of the manipulation that is done by politicians. Then the election monitoring seemed capable of realizing some of the promises in terms of change of attitudes but not necessarily associated with reducing of these violence because they have no control over some of these things and the happenings that are there in our country. Then out of these findings that we got from these research, we at Creco we make the following recommendations and we've shared this with our publics that number one, if we can ensure that there's timely enactment enforcement and the adherence of electoral laws by all stakeholders in our country, there would be improved efforts towards peaceful elections because the perception that is out there in our country is that the electoral body is the sole custodian of making elections free and fair, which is a wrong perception because there are other institutions of governance that are charting the administration and management of elections. For instance the police rarely to do voters associate a strong role of the police in the administration and management of elections. The judiciary, there is a little understanding that the judiciary just in case there's a dispute can be an arbiter or can be the body that we can all go to for interpretation and get guidance on how we can go about it but you know the vulnerability of this misunderstanding makes our people being easily mobilized to go to the streets in protest that are not organized in as much as it's provided for in the constitution but there are many casualties to that effect as opposed to an organized way of communicating to those who are in power. The post-election audits that we have in our country as to the extent reduced to be the work of the electoral commission are not involving all the stakeholders that are charged with the electoral processes in our country so we feel that we make a recommendation that we can also engage the special those ones that are in charge of prevention of electoral violence where they can weigh in advance have a thorough discussion of the preventive measures as opposed to waiting to near elections or election dates so that they can begin mobilizing themselves and now thinking on how they could make prevention efforts. The timelines of elections is a key issue in our country even currently for the next elections in 2022. Parliament is contemplating of making proposals to amend the constitution by not having elections as provided for in the constitution on the second Tuesday of August after the fifth year. They are contemplating of saying let's go to December which is very confusing and prominent political statements have been made and generally you know it creates a lack of order in terms of focus for the next elections so we feel that there is need for communication in terms of advanced communication of these timelines so that the electoral calendar is strictly adhered to by all stakeholders and the systematic documentation of what occurs within the electoral cycle and we can define some preventive measures on the same. Then the creation I mean there's this perception that technology is the answer to having free and fair elections which is a misconception in our country. We tend to believe it but we have a very little understanding of how this technology occurs. In 2017 there was this narrative that the servers on the electronic results I mean the election electronic results I mean transmission was hacked. I mean the transfer through the gadgets from the polling stations to the tallying centres along the way these results were changed but little people have I mean many people have little understanding of how that occurs and that narrative you know has become so entrenched and strong that even this technology is not an answer to the problems that we have in our electoral process so probably we can create awareness and make people to be aware because during voter registration we take our fingerprints we have the biometrics and all that so we feel probably it's a guarantee of having people let's say deceased of not resurrecting and coming to vote as opposed to the witness of two or seven elections in our country but of course that is not the case it can be manipulated it can be messed up by humans and you know and can create chaos. Then openness and transparency the management of elections the independence of the electoral body has always been very suspicious right from you know how they get the funding from the state right from the recruitment of the people that are charged with the leading of these electoral commissions so to some extent it's not a full trust process that everybody understands and say the people we've put to be in charge of administration and management of elections are people we can trust and can execute the mandate of the electoral body to our expectation and satisfaction. Then in our country we serve a lot from non-issue politics because politicians run to their ethnic cults to mobilize them look those votes and we have something now that we normally call it you know the way you the numerics the numerics of communities mobilize this community add plus this community that is like a win so it's about numbers it's not about issues it's not about what affects the citizens of the country in terms of development in terms of the agenda or the ideology that probably the next leadership can offer if they are elected into office so it's about my community plus this community because you are many let's say it's power and and that that is an entrain narrative that if it's easily mobilized and can easily be manipulated in a way that they can cause chaos and I think though I know two or seven is way long ago that is how we suffered at that time because it was this community versus this community then the regulation of political party primaries is key for our country I think that is a recommendation that is very strong because we have a constitutional provision of the registrar of political office of the registrar of political parties but as to the capacity you know and institutionalization of that institution is not there I mean in terms of funding in terms of personnel in terms of regulating as per the provided law that is the political party law that we have in our country and lastly we feel that there should be a national establishment of a national task force in our country on election security to conduct the risk assessment map where these you know risks are there whether there is a extremist groups ethnic mobilization and also that we have advanced information of how to do and and reduce this violence way in advance that mixing are the occurrences and the administering and management of the elections and with that presentation I thank you most sincerely for listening to me can you hear me okay my name is Oscar Blow and I come from the Center for Democrat and Governance and we chair the largest civil society platform and on election observation in Liberia and it's called the elections coordinating committee and we've done this job since 2006 2011 and 2017 Liberia's democracy is is quite young and since the end of the of the civil crisis we've had three elections 206 so 205 uh 2011 and 2017 we've had a deep long history of political violence and I saw this state collapse in the mid uh it denied up to 14 years so we've had three successive democratic elections I've already mentioned and we have that had very deep rooted electoral violence as compared to other countries in Africa but the level of violence we experienced in 2011 and sent a strong signal and that if many state institutions were not supported enough the 2011 the 2017 which was very critical to our political transition and would have been jeopardized we had elections in the midst of all mail that's the UN mission transitioning and in that period all mail sent a very strong message that the you know labyrinths were in custody of their own peace and security more or less and so the 2017 elections needed to be conducted in a very peaceful way to ensure that for close to 150 years sorry because of 50 years we had a peaceful political transition they all go in president then president selive also made a very clear sort of passion that put the nation and that to see our our development in a sustainable way the 2017 elections must be conducted in a very peaceful way and then the political party leaders also you know supported that view so at a very high level and there was a huge commitment from various actors to ensure the elections were held in a peaceful manner at the same time we went to elections with very weak legal framework and we saw that in a lot of contestations around Kennedy's legitimacy and and that's where in the first place I was suffering code for the first time was challenge to really interpret some of the very contentious laws starting with the code of conduct that many librarians believed and was going to be a form of exclusion and in many of the statements by all male by echo us that's economic in coming the worst African states and the outgoing president made very clear that 2017 elections needed to be inclusive as a yas take for peaceful elections so the supreme code then was for the first time drawn into electoral dispute management around the nomination process and some mixed reactions to the opinions of the court and some saw the opinion leaning more towards political than legal but that was that's the supreme cause opinion and that helped stabilize the initial process in 2011 there was a electoral violence that nearly brought the 2011 elections to a halt and there was a sort of limited capacity of the police at the time and and that led to the violence at the opposition and congress for democratic change headquarters that led to the death of one person so people came to the 2017 elections with with some anticipation to see what are this time around the police would be different and from what we saw from the survey from the research from our own work and having deployed 2000 observers across the country we realized that the police in 2017 was much much more prepared in terms of training the police on elections law on engagement, deployment of police in the counties and political party police engagement the police made available police to every political party at every campaign and there was some high level of professionalism demonstrated by the leadership of the police and so that that built citizen trust in one of the key institutions which was the police the police even went out to do what they call yes campaign yes to peace campaign around elections and that was involving the engagement with communities and with young people so we didn't see that in in 2011 so so that was a progression and and a demonstration of the level of of strategic you know engagement of the police we went to the elections the results as the many other countries the results were were contested and the intention was was very very high and the supreme court again the petitions were filed but some parties alleged fraud the supreme court took a long time to make a ruling and it's important that the delayed may have contributed in a way in reducing the tension because the parties were were very it was like a like you know like a balling point so from our side as a civil society observation group combined with international groups as well called for adherence to the rule of law that those who had complaints who had literal grievances was adhere to the rule of law so in as much as our research does not show a direct link but the consistency in our as an independent voice outside of the political parties helped to instill confidence in the process and all the observation groups both national and international were very consistent as we should wait for the verdict and the opinion of the supreme court and that delay process helped to bring down some of the steam that was that was very sort of emerging within the population we saw then on election day it was some mismanagement of the electoral process a lot of mismanagement with cues the cues were not properly managed voters were sent at different locations that created tension with the supreme court's ruling that there it was not substantial fraud which again was highlighted by civil society observation groups both national and international called for the rerun the rerun second round it was very orderly and so that also helped to build citizen trust in the outcome of the results so that that reaffirms the the findings in this study of the election bodies preparedness if we are going to the second round with the same experience from the first round i'm not sure citizens were going to be even prepared to accept the results every grouping laborer engaged the young people from community outreach through sports through music through the community radios there were multiple interventions giving our base of the population being youthful and from the experience from 2011 most interventions targeted young people particularly those in the informal sector and and and and so again from the work on fundamental society that the groupings reaffirmed that multiple youth interventions at different levels can help to prevent electoral violence we believe that going forward to sustain electoral processes and to mitigate violence is important that sustained investment is made in electoral reforms our laws are not responsive to the current political context in Liberia we also believe there's a need for serious political parties engagement around legal reforms our parties don't have laws that govern how they function and and so in a way it makes political parties very heavily personality driven and and in many other countries, countries like Liberia, people don't vote because of the issues that are presented and people are driven by personalities and and therefore it becomes important that if we have a strong political party law it can help to to strengthen political parties citizens engagement and then it is a need to have serious reform around election and management bodies and we think that the current laws around how election management bodies have established gives too much power to the president and and in the so power in the president to appoint election management bodies create a room for manipulation and it's very important that even though the law says the president shall nominate and will consent that they send it appoint we think the process needs to be consultative with the involvement of political parties with the involvement of civil society and that the turning of of the elections management bodies officials sort of limited to a fixed amount of time and so that we don't have a few people controlling how elections are done with all the body itself reflecting democratic principles and then lastly you should around civic engagement and this is a very new new new democracy citizens don't just go to the polls to vote but it requires a long-term preparedness and to understand the roles and responsibilities of different stick actors in how elections are conducted and how results are interpreted and how results are transmitted and accepted by the population thank you thank you oscar sort of great observations thank you as well joshua and and incan we were talking earlier before the event started talking about some of the similarities and differences in both countries i think they've both faced significant challenges in the run-up to these elections but i think also difference in the way they handled the the challenge that they faced what i'll be doing now for the sake of time is to pull together the time that we had reserved for questions and answers if it's fine i will already ask and invite the second panel we have two speakers another panel the wise two individuals pat brunelow and then john tamacevski on the in r.i. who will be coming up providing some initial feedback on the findings provide some some impressions from your own experience and then we will bring the microphones with us to the front row and then bring together the time for questions and answers there's a lot of knowledge around the room as well so we have plenty of time for questions together so i'll think i'll handle it that way so at that point i think join me in thanking our guest as well jt and pat it's really a distant pleasure to have you with us today welcome as yonis referenced i think this portion of the program is really designed to be more of a facilitated discussion but we would really love to hear right now your insights into some of the key findings that were just presented especially from your perspectives as people who have really been thinking deeply and working very actively for a great number of years on this issue of elections democratization processes and through the lens of conflict prevention particularly jt i don't know if you want to go ahead first and then we can hear from pat well first thank you for inviting me to participate in this panel and thank you to our speakers i think it's great to hear and sort of relook at the experiences in liberia kenya two countries which are both ndi and iri follow very closely as important models not only for election observation but sort of looking at big pictures like election related violence and how to how to prevent it through really strong programming i think i'll just talk about a few quick things that sort of come to mind on my end that may not directly relate to the report but thinking as a programmer and sort of how the development community can do a better job of getting on top of this you know a few things come to mind so first is the issue of scenario mapping um you know a lot of scenario planning is done in advance of elections but clearly in the case of both votes um additional scenarios could have been put in place for instance uh the scenario planning of what would have happened uh if nasa boycotted the vote if there was even a runoff vote in kenya if the supreme court overturned the election result uh it seemed to win a number of those developments took place many in the community were trying to scramble to figure out what's the reaction how do we adjust our well coordinated civic and voter education plans our peace messaging uh platforms i think the same goes for liberia too and you know we've seen this you know the the runoff election is often a place where things really come to a boiling point so how do we uh adjust and and make the the necessary programmatic changes the other thing that i've talked about a lot previously in other forums and we'll continue to say here is uh support to these initiatives has to be ongoing and continuous um the development community particularly if you look at the usg side and i think you know a number of a number of development professionals will tell you uh they they acknowledge this and want to make changes is the issue of continuous engagement so um if it turns out that the the library and national police did do a good job or can make some improvements let's work on it now if you look at the grievances and that lead up to the 2017 election several of them were related to the supreme court ruling in 2013 that made serious recommendations that had to be implemented and reforms that had to be implemented that were delayed for quite some time and gave the impetus for the opposition to grab onto it um and begin doing what we see a lot of opposition parties do on the continent which is go after the institution go after the institution knock it down um and and allege fraud from that angle and we've seen that in in several cases on the continent i think the other issue is um you know a better level of communication so it strikes me when you talk about election monitoring in this report the issues of the awareness of citizens and perceptions in the area surveyed they may or may not know certain things and added value from monitoring that's occurring at the level of the the diplomats at the level of working with the electoral commission and these other institutions um a number of those benefits i'm sure pat can having been on the inside of some of those discussions particularly in kenya you know can provide some really good information that i think citizens would benefit from so how do we communicate that better and then of course uh also the thing that we've seen um continually not just in Liberia and Kenya but the issue of we ask political parties as a key mitigating factor of violence to train agents to be there at polling stations on election day but what continues to be a major challenge and often a failure of the process is the information that comes out of those polling stations from their agents back to the parties and how to collect that data formulated as evidence and turn it into a realistic case that can be made if you have a true grievance as a result of certain breakdowns in what nasa was trying to do particularly odm operation you saw on election day that information was coming back sporadically it certainly wasn't to the degree in which could have been used um if you look at some of the reports that came out of Liberia party agents i think it's like 16 only filed complaints you know locally with the in the polling unit so how do we get party agents more engaged so that they can play a more constructive role but also parties understand how to use that rather than just watching your back and sort of having someone there to fight for every vote how do you use that as an effective reporting mechanism and i think that's key um you know i think the other thing that's notable about this report and you know be useful to have a discussion on it is the choice of the counties that were looked at for kenya i'm much more familiar with kenya than Liberia but i think not looking at the coast um particularly mombasa quali califi those counties have some serious particular dynamics that often are at play that that aren't captured elsewhere in the country so that's another one and then you know the one thing that we see in both countries is the role of the media the issue of hate speech disinformation social media those factors all need to be dealt with in some way and it seems to me that in both countries in both cases the issue of prosecution the issue of making it stick the issue of dealing and clarifying with information that's put out there because often these platforms are actually not twitter or facebook but what's at text messages so it's just the audience receiving it at that moment not everyone sees it create serious challenges for clarifying and putting that type of information out there civic and voter education needs to be more than just putting butts in seats and teaching people how to vote and what their constitution says but teaching them how to use the information so how do you actually do it what what happens if you run into a problem at a polling station um and of course uh as josh will point it out in the kenya case i think the changing to the the date of the election which is being proposed and i'm sure uh in both Liberia and Kenya and the lead up to those election next elections we'll have situations where regulations are changed at the very last minute how does that information get out there more rapidly so thinking through those scenarios and putting that down is is crucial um for me so i'll have more later maybe um when you said panel of the wise we looked at each other and said wise guys um you know i mean when you get to this point everything that needs to be said has been said and so you might wish that i would exercise my right to be silent um but i won't i'll make a couple of comments one uh to really to help applaud usip for taking on a study that would look at multi dimensions um of how to prevent electoral related violence and to do a comparative approach between countries there's very little work that's been done of either type and i think beginning to explore this more is going to be valuable for all of us over a period of time that being said i think it's also very important to note that the conclusions reached in the study should not be set in stone the depth of the experience and looking at one election is compared to multiple elections in a country looking only at two countries as compared to multiple countries does not give us the kind of depth of data that allow us to make strong conclusions i think that's you know very important nonetheless i do agree with in general the conclusions that have been highlighted both in the report itself but in the presentations today um and i have to before i go a bit further do a little bit of a disclaimer and that is that in the case of Liberia and Kenya not only are the organizations that these two gentlemen represent long term trusted and admired partners of mdi both josh went oscar when they refer to me or greet me as friends and colleagues i'm honored by that and i think usip made very great choices in how you went about picking partners in those countries the the next sort of preface statement that i would make is there's seven recommendations at the end of the report those recommendations i don't believe are necessarily based solely on the findings of the report they reflect a broader experience of usip and other studies that have been done and i think all seven of them in general deserve to be explored and i think they're all quite wise and they've been impeded in different ways by both josh and oscar up here so now what can i bring to this that's a bit different the first point that's made about the importance of electro management bodies election commissions and about the police and more broadly the security services and i would say drawing that out a bit further the courts and the judicial element that is three sectors of state institutions that are critical when it comes to electoral processes to say that they should be strong or to say that they should not perform poorly needs to be teased out a bit more and and oscar i think you did this you know very well so i'm just going to repeat and highlight a bit of what you said the critical element in elections whether or not there is violence um and the critical uh role of violence in elections of course is contextual whether that is the attack of el shabab or the attacks over these past few weeks in afghanistan against the elections or frankly the mailing of 14 pipe bombs in the united states of america the election violence has to be contextualized to be understood and how when you ask the question of what works in mitigating the potentials for destabilizing elections or more broadly society um it has to do with essentially public trust and without building public trust in those state institutions you end up with the ability of citizens to be manipulated public trust doesn't come as blind trust public trust is based on citizens including the electoral competitors and other so-called stakeholders in my view citizens are the primary stakeholders because they're the ones who are choosing who is going to represent them with the powers of government those who compete are definitely stakeholders and those who are charged with running and administering the election process are stakeholders but primarily as the citizens unless the citizens really can see into and understand the nature of these processes they're they're not going to trust they're going to be subject to manipulation by the polarizing influence of the political competitors and in societies where we're looking at deep polarization and perhaps in kenya's case even hyper polarization and where that polarization is based on long-term deep-rooted grievances mixed in many times with ethnic issues and this doesn't just apply to africa it applies to other continents as well then the the efforts at building public trust have to be all the more serious all the more long-term and all the more multifaceted and i i don't want to spend a lot of time talking but i do want to make just this one point rather than multiple points public trust in kenya was undermined by multiple year campaign to destroy the trust and faith and confidence in state institutions the supreme court was attacked even though in 1913 even though the the verdict was accepted there was a campaign about the nature of the court that led to the change of the chief justice and a number of other justices on the court there was a sustained campaign of attack on the election commission there were a lot of mistakes in the so-called old iabc and there was chicken gate and there were other things that brought them under scrutiny but nonetheless there was political expediency in attacking that state institution undermining public trust in that institution and the same was true of the police so unless the public sees how these processes are done and builds their own sense of confidence that they're being done properly then they're not likely to dismiss claims in the next election coming up the things went wrong and that's part of what we experienced in kenya and we experienced less i think in Liberia and the polarization as you mentioned was not a severe in Liberia but also there was much more work done with the Liberian national police over a long period of time to build their capacities and the capacities weren't just the capacities of giving them more vehicles which they needed or better uniforms and tools which they needed it was helping them to establish community policing helping them to establish transparency helping them to understand what how to constrain the use of force to appropriate levels to the circumstance and helping the community understand that this work was being done a second thing that i believe you mentioned is important about Liberia is that the incumbent president was not standing for office and she was not backing very strongly either of the candidates which is a more conducive circumstance for the state apparatus including the course of apparatus of the state the police the military and so on to be used in a way that is neutral politically and is to be perceived to be neutral politically so i'm just concentrating on one example i could elaborate this through the election commission and i'll end with one final point about election commissions because the international community invests a tremendous amount in building the capacities of election commissions and we you know someone from ifis bill sweeney or someone could really help elaborate on this point but what is important isn't just that they have the ability to do the logistics as both of our speaker said it's important that the public perceive that this commission be politically impartial right from the very beginning what are the mechanisms by which they are appointed or confirmed to their office both in Liberia and kenya is problematic how do those people perform in a way that you build trust which is based on transparency we talk about electoral transparency but i can you know i've written a lot about this i won't go into it but i want to turn to one last point about the election commission lack of transparency when the link between that and procurement particularly of advanced electoral technologies country by country by country around the world the pressure is on electoral authorities to acquire and implement more and more sophisticated electronic technologies the decisions are typically made in non-inclusive processes that is the political stakeholders the parties and civil society they care about electoral integrity are not at the table when the decisions are made the procurement processes are not transparent they're subject to manipulation and even corruption in many cases and typically the timelines are insufficient to be able to do the kinds of training testing and allowing the public to understand that they're going to work well and to make the fixes necessary so that on election day when whether it's Liberia or kenya two elections or zimbabwe where we just were together or i could take you around the world the failures of the technologies feed the suspicions and exacerbate the potentials for large-scale post-election violence so if we want to make anti-violence issues work and we want to build strong commissions police forces and other state institutions as part of this what we also have to do is take into building public trust opening up procurement processes looking at the public policy nature of decisions of whether technologies are appropriate to the national circumstance and whether they're being embedded in a way that leads to less tension more public trust in elections and governments as a as an end and then i'll i'll stop with this quote i once was privileged to be standing with two well with mr kofi anon and former president obisangio and mr anon said to president obisangio do you think it was a rhetorical question of course do you think that elections give democracy a bad name and president obisangio in his way with a big smile said i think that authoritarianism corruption and bad politics give elections a bad name and i think we need to turn the dialogue on its head change the paradigm and look more deeply into what are the problems in society outside of elections that affect elections if we're going to build public confidence in the ability of election commissions to perform and we're going to have trust that allow us to avoid violence yeah if i could just add to pat's comment on the issue of technology i was very present in kenyan 2013 when we got into the bvr game uh and of course the electronic poll books results transmission process and what the way that this information was communicated to the public is that this would don't worry this is going to make everything better um and what i would argue is that the the profit motive on the part of the procurement and certainly those corrupt individuals who take advantage of that procurement process as evidenced by recent audits and reports out of 2017 show that you know it's the corruption in the profit behind it that really has a destabilizing effect it forces the actress who are profiting from it to create trouble and to keep the process going we need to buy more we need to do more i mean it's important to point out that you know this was kenya's most expensive election in 2017 and per voter one of the most expensive in the world like $25 a person so and that is just you know hands down extremely expensive and you know we always talk about kenya's 2017 elections as they bought a catalac they probably needed a forward fusion and and that's the other thing you don't even you buy this technology and you don't even go through the the rigor of testing it or having the necessary support structures to adapt to the scenarios when things go wrong i think that's a really important point um you know regarding the technology side um i was in nigeria in march um for usip and we um we were lucky enough to have access to you know meeting with the election commissioners and civil society groups and there was a lot of concern about the technology that was going to be nigeria was very proud of being the first country in west africa to have nationwide um electronic voting machines and the election commission was actually i have to say um they were down into each community they brought um an election machine to every small community and they would get shuttle buses to you know communicate to constituents that they could practice using one they could see how it was operated and getting to this point of communicating and building the public trust i think that while there were lots of gaps in that process um you know they did they did a pretty good job in trying to relay this notion that their election commission was trying to do a good job in bringing technology to nigeria and making it available to local communities about this holistic approach to um violence prevention and elections that has been touched upon by our excellent panelists and our speakers um what does that mean for us as people who are all um either on a policy level or um a programmatic level how can we improve upon um the next elections coming up for example in liberia and kenya um what should we be focusing on how can we do better at observation given um contextual changes dynamics and trends in the environment it's kind of a broad question then i want to open it up to the room you can go first thanks first i mean to stay on the the one point what can we do as people who are part of the policy community in washington dc to have some effect upon the issues that we talked about just staying with the issue of technologies um and two weeks ago i was with the european parliament in a in a program around you know questions like this and the same thing applies here why in the world would us aid or the european assistance agencies give money to a country to procure a technology that's likely to destabilize the political environment why wouldn't you insist up front that there be public four or five main lessons to incorporate that into the process otherwise there's not assistance i mean this is an assistance development policy that reflects issues that are well settled but part of the problem is the people get rushed and i you know it'll be fair about this vendors and tech i like technology and i use it as quickly as most anybody else um vendors come on the scene and they're pushing it and there's reasons they want to make money and they also many of them believe that there are technologies who help solve problems of fraud etc but this the dialogue in the trust building that's important that relates the same thing about the question of police i mean in places like cambodia or zimbabwe where we just were where there's not anyone questioning the separation of party and state where the course of apparatus of the state whether it's the military opening fire on the in zimbabwe where the two of us happen to be within range of the fire and our mission was taken over to the us embassy to be sheltered um everyone knew that that was being done at the behest of people who were seeking a certain political outcome so unless the police are depoliticized so police assessment police training and so on needs to be tied to depoliticization i mean that's a very simple point so there's the public policy and now turning to you know the second part of your question and trying to stay brief about it what can observers do first of all the emphasis has to be on citizens there is nothing more sovereign of an act than an election and citizens have to be the ones not only who choose who are going to be their governmental representatives but who ensure the integrity of the process so investing in citizen capacities to bring about electoral integrity which is a long-term process and you know both joshua and oscar attested this in in their life commitments to this work um and we have seen in my 25 years working in this arena over the arc of time we have seen demonstrative evidence that country after country citizen capacities to monitor electoral processes and to put forward legitimate and appropriate recommendations for electoral reform and to embed that it's quite strong that's where the investment needs to be we need international observers to particularly in places where there aren't the domestic capacities to mitigate the potentials for violence and international observers have to be better aware of the potentials for contributing to violence mitigation there you know we iri ndi the eu the osce everyone has written papers and reports on this and so i won't be laborer the point but i also want to pick up a point that jt meant made this particular study did not look at preventative diplomacy either by first track official diplomats or second track activities um but that's very important you know when log conducts a parallel vote tabulation and those findings are transmitted to party leaders the the i e b c the election commission and the diplomats that is embedded in a process that leads to mitigating potentials for violence um it's very very important in zimbabwe when the army opened fire and killed six people a few days after the elections why because the presidential election results were not being released so the lack of transparency led to heightened tensions and and a confrontation the international observers the african union the commonwealth our joint mission and others met with the president of the country and several of his cabinet members and they knew why we were coming why we had urgently requested the the meeting we had released also a joint statement calling for an end of excessive force by police live fire and the kind of vandalism that was taking place that certainly um didn't justify the use of that level of force i think in part we save lives by doing that and that isn't even what happened by our talking to the diplomats who had their private meetings but the combination of pressures contributed to a circumstance as did our meetings with the opposition just there knowing that we were in action i think helped make a difference so there are a lot of ways to look at this that are nuanced and their stories that you know i could bore you with that are more dramatic than that that you know i don't repeat in public because sometimes you have a private meeting and it should stay private he's illuminating um just to add to that i mean i think the sample-based observation that zessin conducted in zimbabwe played an important role for the ambassador to have that in his pocket now the public doesn't know about that but when you have a vote that's that close within two something percent of having to go to a runoff and then really ramping up this game between mdc and nopf really had a role to play but this goes directly to the issue of policy and probably often the disconnect between the policy folks and the program folks maybe at the usg level i have seen assessment after assessment in fact i was just reading what a usa id library security risk assessment vulnerability assessment all of the stuff is in there about how to plan for this we have it the rapid reaction assessment that was done by usa id um with a number of high-pay consultants in 2013 had all of the information in there or at least certainly the starting point for planning a good program and using whatever budget was available to do that so we have to read our stuff that's the first thing the second thing is the inclusivity of it in terms of making sure that um and again these assessments often involve a lot of stakeholders i'm sure crico and others i'm sure in library it's the same thing you go through these interviews with these consultants um when it when it comes to finally creating that program it's not always as inclusive and i think this was addressed by the panel a little bit so there has to be more engagement and co-creation and writing of these projects so that it does not just focus on what an assessment says in data or a few interviews with civil society but an ongoing discussion about how to make sure that this is adaptive and moving through the time pieces i would just say finally on you know technology and sort of where the usg is i mean i think right now what we see in drc is a classic example uh u n about if she's still you an ambassador right nicky hailey goes to drc strikes a deal with um kabila and says we're gonna have an election on 23rd december nothing after that where was the money for support where was the engagement where was the plan the current drc project funded by usa id that focused on electoral assistance of which we are a recipient we didn't receive till a few months ago so the stuff has to happen faster especially if we're directly involved in pushing the needle and also we can see how in drc just as a further example to library in kenya that these election these these voting machines that have been brought to the country sold by the koreans has a track record number of security vulnerabilities number of issues play a direct destabilizing factor and will have a large role to play in the outcome of this election and the violence associated with it thanks um there's a wealth of experience not only up here but in the room maybe at this time we can take a couple of questions and maybe some comments i don't know how this works okay thanks tonus um let's start in the back thanks very much for uh for your comments and your information my name is gwen dillard i was one of the international observers with the kenyan election uh working with the carter center and i wanted to respond pat mainly to what you were saying about um technology uh and also what you were saying about is the responsibility of the the citizens the voting citizens the electorate to monitor the process of the election the technology that was involved in kenya's election was quite complicated right from the biometric identification of voters matching that up with voter rolls the uploading of information from from polling stations to tele centers from tele centers to the central uh uh uh correlating center it was a really long involved process and a lot of it included the chain that was simply not visible to anyone it certainly wasn't visible to the international monitors and i can tell you from sitting in one of those tele centers at night between 10 p.m and 2 in the morning we would get no information about the status of the election about who was ahead about actual percentage points there would be just a blackout and the explanation was well we're trying to upload this information but for the moment there's nothing it was much longer than for a moment there's nothing there was nothing for very very long periods of time i'm not sure it's realistic to expect citizens to be able to penetrate this process because during all those hours that no information was coming out suspicions were growing and rumors were flowing and if international observers sitting in the centers with a certain western understanding of how this electronic process should function if we were not able to see into that process and we were not i don't know how ordinary citizens could ever be asked to monitor this and how they could ever get a sense of transparency thank you very much pauline mochina from kenya um and i just wanted to highlight the fact that sometimes observers just come during the election and not before the election so they don't know the dynamics of the situation and by that they've caused problems instead of helping so there needs to be uh preparation prior and there needs to be observation of the rhetoric that is leading into violence even before the elections so it doesn't have to be at the election where you are now uh sending police or you're sending observers or you are trying to change the rhetoric at the last moment then the other thing is that everything done in secret everything done in secret will always have a secrecy around it so for me and for many others probably i don't know but it feels like as long as we continue to hide you know how people are voting and i i believe in democracy and i believe in people being able to vote for who they want to vote without being identified whom they voted for but it looks like instead of investing in these electoral machines that are causing a lot of problems we need to think of how to make it public so that one vote one person is counted publicly and it is known by everybody in a child who is looking at it thank you thank you and if i could ask everyone to please introduce themselves before they ask the question over here thank you very much my name is Olu Mide student at GWU and in Nigeria so i asked the question last week during the press conference interestingly most of the most of the questions have been answered by the panelists but right now i just want to ask one question with respect to best practices and first and foremost a very big thank you to NDI and IRI for the work you're doing in Nigeria i've worked a lot with you you know in Nigeria and even back here in the States considering considering the not too young children that was just passed in which were a major factor you know in facilitating it's a lot of gains right now between 2015 and now we had we had a peaceful transition of power from an incumbent president to an opposition that was a major gain for us in Nigeria so in order not to consolidate on those gains that we have made in the last four in the last three or four years 2019 there have been projections especially from UCP you know of certain outspots in Nigeria talking about the election rather than certain outspots i'm from Lagos i'm also a politician i run for office in 2015 and i have my constituency which is the youth constituency there's so much tension growing on right now at the grassroot level which if nothing is done might be a long way in empowering the gains that we have made so i want to ask apart from all the various work you've been doing at the national level what steps considering the best practices that you have been able to see from Kenya and Liberia what steps are we taking to a vast potential violence especially at the grassroot level and what do you think we can do in the youth community to also contribute to the work you're doing thank you my name is Abdullah Duklip from Liberia i was there during the election 2011 and 2012 uh blur i wanted to raise this issue i think the fact that there was no violence in Liberia was because CDC was winning if the supreme court has sat on the result if CDC was involved in the process we will have had violence so that's one point uh the second point i want to make is that uh the machine's kind of complicated electoral process in Africa uh if you don't understand it here how do you expect my grandmother in a little village somewhere to understand what i think the best election we had in Africa in the last five years were the Gambian elections they use marbles and the president lost so why all these machines and stuff you know people trying to sell some official want to buy the machine to get a kick back and then therefore you get into this cycle of conspiracy theories and for example they talk about Liberia you talk about Liberia the election commission bought a signboard for $65,000 that is used only during election time why do you use that why do why do you spend $65,000 to buy the billboard thank you well i think the questions many of them are interrelated so um how to look at electronic technologies i think there are absolutely there are limits on what international observers can do and when you you know witness that um in in Kenya for example there was a claim that the IEBC's computers had been hacked and that the results up and down the line had been changed as a consequence of the hacking and there was evidence presented both to the Supreme Court and copies of that evidence even before the court case were presented to international observers now you might ask the question would you expect international observers to have the level of competence to evaluate that evidence so like i'm going to belabor this just a bit the the IEBC's servers were privately held companies servers there were proprietary contracts that kept those databases closed the IEBC itself didn't have access to the code the databases the servers themselves were located in Europe so that when the Supreme Court ordered that those databases be made available for inspection those contracts got in the way so there's something that international observers and citizen observers could have asked months before when the procurement process was taking place i mean so part of the reason why i'm emphasizing the public policy nature of these decisions to adopt technologies and the checklist of things that could be examined at that point is what i'm i'm trying to get how do you open the process up so that it can be seen that particular evidence that was presented was really quite interesting because i've told the story many times that the we were requested later if we would be able to have an expert in oracle systems databases to examine things and i happen to be connected to various ways to oracle corporation in which case i asked you know one of the principles um what could you do in the i would got a question well how would you know which databases there are over 127 databases they are incorporated by companies in various ways into their products and those products would be sitting somewhere in europe so we wouldn't know which expert to send and if we did you wouldn't be able to afford that person so what are the expectations now that comes back to the question of citizens i think you know jt wisely said political parties and civic groups need to have the capacities to examine these issues as the public policy decisions are being made and to enter into the process and to create mechanisms by which they will be happy now we could talk about ireland and germany and other places that are going back to paper systems but we also could talk about the netherlands where there's a neutral body that's selected by the political parties and that that party that body has access to all of the databases as they're running before during and after the elections and they make pronouncements there are lots of ways to address issues but they have to be done in a way that's inclusive in a way that is politically neutral so then one more comment i'll let the youth thing for jt but outcome orientation i think yes when you have an incumbent president who is not running and her party is not in a position to be able to manipulate the the administrative resources of the state it's a very different circumstance you know than in a circumstance where you have an incumbent president and deputy president who are consolidating power over their first term and who are determined to hold on to power as our most elected officials for another term and where there is the ability to put pressure on courts on election commissions and on the police to act in certain ways and so i would you know ask a question in those places in Kenya where police were seen to act appropriately what's the political geography of that area as compared to the where the police did not act appropriately and we have to dig a bit deeper into the data to be able to understand what the implications are which comes back to my main point if there's politically impartial state institutions that are competent including courts competent to give real remedies then you're likely to have a very important improvement in the electoral circumstance i agree with that finding wholeheartedly but i think it's much more nuanced than and we could get to in this particular report yeah on blackouts it's notable that on election evening in 2017 in Mathara and Kanguare there were actually a number of right attacks that occurred in those slums that turned into then fights between the two major political sides we saw the media on several occasions do a voluntary blackout there's a lot of questions about whether that was very effective because what raid and supreme in the absence of that information was social media and further investigation of both of those incidents has showed that were actually incidents of crime and thuggery and less about political retribution but because of the rumors that were being spread around that jubilees attacking the luos the luos and the nasa are attacking the kakuyus there was a lot of back and forth that probably could have been stopped had more information been made public just really quickly on the technology and the issue of citizens i think what's key for this goes back to my initial comment citizen civic education voter education needs to be active it can't be butts in seats it can't you've got to teach people how to do something not just you know learn something so how do you use this information how do you speak up you see something wrong so expanding the scope of that education to actually how to engage and i think that's a challenge culturally uh in kenya certainly because of its history and i think liberia has some angles on that as well election observation missions need to innovate i think the approach and methodology used in zimbabwe was an innovation although it's not a permanent innovation but certainly more case specific but just like we have legal analysts and electoral analysts we now need technology analysts sitting inside the leadership teams of these electoral observations people who actually know oracle databases and can ask those questions well in advance and really make you know some inputs i think the other thing just responding to alamute i think the issue of not too young to run is great and it certainly opened up to nominate any contests of course the nomination fees were extremely high and expensive of course the primaries we have a number of cases where apc and pdp gave out nominations and then they come to find out that the list that went to the iabc or that the that tynec was actually different people so there are a lot of challenges in the hurdles you can change the law but you've also got to invest in the process i think it's a long-term thing and then um you know finally on gambia the international community has been pushing for them to turn to a more modern way of doing elections they've refused they like their marbles so hopefully it'll stick that way and we and our donor money won't push them in a direction they shouldn't be in thanks do the other panelists have anything to say or would you any of you like to respond to some of the comments that have been made thank you and with respect to improving observation i think it's important for international observation groups to work more closely with national observation groups we stay on the ground after you leave we confront the political parties we engage the government we push for electoral reforms you come you parachute and you leave so give us more voice and in the engagement of these processes and secondly to respect Nigeria i think it's important that youth programs are led by youth themselves they know the issues and and again you cannot come and impose in the programs you know within a particular context and try to avoid one side faces all lastly i yes uh big brother i know you very well yes and it was it was a point that i made but he's taking it and my question was you know on my presentation at the new race what if the opposition congress for democratic change had lost and we don't know what would have been the situation in Liberia and and thankfully the leadership of the ruling party at the time the person who was running demonstrated strong leadership as well so electoral violence is is also deeply rooted not just in the electoral reforms in election management party but it's also rooted in perception thank you so i'll keep it short but um let me just make the following observation basically most of the issues raised were comments compliments uh but there's something mutina said if i got your name right that there's nothing secret in elections which should be the rule of the game the only secrecy that we have is the secrecy of the ballot and the secrecy of the voter bio details because of security issues and all that but anything budget election officials polling stations voters register the practice should be make it open for the public and that is how faith and confidence is built then uh tom i agree with you that um we need to innovate build the scenarios um i think the business of election monitoring and observation is evolving in kenya in 2007 we have 27 000 stationary observers who are placed in different polling stations but after the post-election violence when we as observers were asked to give our verdict we took so long to analyze the data because we didn't have capacity to analyze 26 000 ad copy questionnaires that had been built by observers and i think in 2013 part if you remember we had 960 pvt observers through a random sample in polling stations i think i was the pvt manager then at that time and we are able to give um um what do you call um the verdict um our assessment of the electoral environment on the e-day but what we failed was to communicate to the public on what pvd would address and we ran into more problems just that you know because we didn't you know the scenario building you talked about at home in 2013 um um um um you know the complexities of what pvt can address and what it can't issues of the tiling center became very emotive and i think in kenya that has been discussed and talked about that probably the national tiling center is where there's a problem not the polling station so this is a game of trying to study the whole round of it and ensuring that we have a full understanding and communicate are the same then lastly issues of technology um we had a strong belief that this is going to address our problems in 2013 the biometric voter registration without probably uh citizens we are registering their details just to prevent dead voters coming to vote as witnessed in 2007 but the perception out there voters thought that they were going to vote electronically that this is an adopted technology as in developed countries but that was not communicated so people came with different expectations in 2017 we changed that and we had the evid electronic voter integrated devices um but that did not even address our problem it even made our problems much more complex so i think as thomas said and part that we need to innovate see what is practical simple make it less complex and manage our elections in a way that is affordable to our countries thank you so much thank you thank you joshua i think we've come to the end of this great panel i'd just like to uh say a few words in conclusion and then thank everybody i think first of all certainly our research findings should not be cut into stone that's how research works the findings are as well until the next study comes around completely contradicting what we just found but no uh it all seriousness i think um this is a research stream that we've been working on for for several years for five six years and i think we're a layer after layer able to add some more new ones but i think the question about what works and what doesn't work is an important one particularly in the election space where often the programming is done in a very rushed sense and we have to select one approach or the other on their severe type constraints and severe budgetary constraints so strengthening the knowledge base on under which context which approach seems to be more conducive to risk mitigation is an important one and i really invite everybody to come and work with us as well in helping us strengthen that that that stream a few quick thoughts on preventive diplomacy prevent diplomacy has always been part of our repertoire of instruments that we've looked at in fact quite likely a usip book will come out next year that looks at that topic specifically election violence preventive diplomacy as well as a short paper on the topic uh because we certainly recognize the importance of diplomacy every research has its strengths and its limitations the methodology that we had adopted where you look a lot at perception based uh measurement of the scope of prevention as it is received by the recipients of the programming that not lend itself very easily to measuring both the impact and the the scope of preventive diplomacy other methodologies are needed for that so i'm i'm glad we're able to come up with complementary studies like the one that was conducted by bourgeoisie pockerel who's a Jenner Jennings Randolph senior fellow here at usip and i looked at that instrument quite specifically um and finally i think a point that really stood out to me during this conversation is one that was raised about the trends of uh attacking institutions i think that's one we have to all keep in mind because it affects everybody's work including ours um people that are engaged in the programming and policy sphere uh if institutions and the work of organizations working on peace building is being undermined it may shift the way we have to do our work because we're not fully in control of course about the narrative of who does what uh in in the space of elections and i think where winners and losers are being decided it's a very vulnerable space to be in as an institute of peace uh that is the case as well um but let please join me in thanking uh our speaker particularly our guests uh from kenya liberia joshua changuoni oscar blow as well as pat merleau uh jt um ingo bourgeois kowski as well as debbie liang venton thank you all for joining us and i'll see you again soon