Alok Shukla
At the time of the interview, Alok Shukla had served as a deputy election commissioner in the Election Commission of India for around two years. He had previously served as the chief electoral officer for the state of Chhattisgarh.
At the time of the interview, Alok Shukla had served as a deputy election commissioner in the Election Commission of India for around two years. He had previously served as the chief electoral officer for the state of Chhattisgarh.
At the time of the interview, S.K. Mendiratta was the legal advisor to the Election Commission of India. He began his career nearly 46 years earlier as an assistant in the Election Commission. Beginning in 1979, Mendiratta was responsible for all legal affairs of the commission, including electoral reform legislation and litigation work of the commission before the Supreme Court and High Courts in India. Although he had been retired for 13 years at the time of the interview, Mendiratta continued much of his work in an advisory position.
Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury explains the process by which the Bangladesh Army created an electronic voter registration process and electronic electoral roll with photographs. The Electoral Commission chose the Army for this task out of various national and international organizations who submitted offers. He describes several capabilities that the Army brought to the task, including several officers with information technology (IT) skills and the ability, with the Navy and Coast Guard, to reach geographically remote communities. One challenge he identifies was finding and training staff with the necessary IT skills and acquiring the necessary technological resources, such as laptops, cameras, and finger print scanners. To address this need within a short time frame, he explains that the army sought out a number of vendors and occasionally accepted assistance from United Nations Development Project (UNDP). Chowdhury describes how the Army developed software to collect the voters’ information and identify multiple registrations by maintaining the registry. He explains the verification processes for the voter registry, including local government authentication of data and review by the Department for International Development (DFID) and UNDP.
At the time of this interview Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury was serving as the project director for the Election Commission’s voter list project. The project, formally known as the Preparation of Electoral Roll with Photographs, began in 2007. He came to this position as a Brigadier General in the Bangladesh Army.
At the time of this interview, Senesee Freeman was a Program Officer for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in Liberia. Freeman studied at the University of Liberia and proceeded to work in local Liberia-based development agencies, including the New African Research and Development Agency (NARDA), where he worked to facilitate the capacity building of local non-governmental organizations. He later worked with Synergies International; where he aimed to assist marginalized populations, including ex-combatants, reintegrate themselves into Liberian society.
Khalfan H. Khalfan, executive director of the Organization of People with Disabilities, talks about his and others' efforts in Zanzibar to enfranchise disabled people. He addresses the challenges involved in ensuring disabled people can exercise their right to vote and explains the particular difficulties disabled people face in accessing polling stations, casting their votes in private, and avoiding election violence. He also speaks briefly about his role as an election observer in Zanzibar’s first multiparty election in 1995 and some of the irregularities he noted during that election.
At the time of this interview, Khalfan H. Khalfan was executive director of the Organization of People with Disabilities, an advocacy group that he founded in 1985 in his native Zanzibar. He became involved in disabled-rights activism after traveling to Singapore to attend a meeting for the disabled in 1981, the International Year of Disabled People. Khalfan also founded the Eastern African Federation of the Disabled. He was a member of the World Council of Disabled People International for more than 20 years, an elected vice chair for development and underrepresented groups of Disabled People International from 2002 to 2007, and chairperson of the Pan African Federation of the Disabled for 12 years. Prior to his activism on behalf of rights for the disabled, he worked as a secondary-school teacher for almost 20 years. He died in March 2009.
Fatma Ally, chairperson of the Zanzibar Female Lawyers Association, talks about the group’s voter-education efforts during the 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections. She details the challenges the organization faced in reassuring voters of its neutrality. She also discusses how messages for the voter education program were developed and the difficulties that the association encountered in securing enough time for the education program before the polling date.
At the time of this interview, Fatma Ally was the chairperson of the Zanzibar Female Lawyers Association. She also worked as an executive counselor at the association.
Clarence Kipobota draws on his experience working on pre- and post-election issues at the Legal and Human Rights Center to address various aspects of Tanzania’s electoral process. He highlights problems with the independence of the Electoral Committee, updating the permanent voter registry, ensuring the enfranchisement of marginalized groups and combating voter fraud. He also details how the center and its partners were pushing for reform, and he discusses the voter-education activities they were leading.
Clarence Kipobota joined the Legal and Human Rights Center in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, after graduating from law school in 2003. At the time of this interview, he held the position of outreach services coordinator, working to coordinate nine different programs focusing on mass education, human rights monitoring, gender, legal aid, public engagement, election watch, Parliament watch, justice watch and government watch. He was involved in the pre- and post-election activities of the center.
At the time of this interview, George Sarpong was the executive secretary of the National Media Commission in Ghana. His extensive experience included involvement with media issues relating to elections through his capacity as the executive director of the Youth Network for Human Rights and Democracy, working with youth to increase capacity to participate in democratic discourse, and on issues to prevent violence in elections. He served as a member of the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers, coordinating media activities, and consulted regularly on media, media monitoring, and governance issues for multiple organizations. He also was involved in elections in Sierra Leona, Cameroon and Liberia.
Alex Paila discusses various aspects of national and local election management in Sierra Leone during 2007 and 2008. These areas include the recruitment, training, evaluation and monitoring of election staff; election security; voter registration, audits and curtailment of voter fraud; information dissemination, media relations and enfranchisement of marginalized groups; and financial and logistical constraints and concerns. He also emphasizes cooperation with community-based civilian organizations as key for information dissemination and higher voter turnouts, and he stresses relations with international organizations to improve workers’ training and monitoring, and secure funding. Paila also speaks about the issues of districting and determining electoral timetables. Finally, he reflects upon some of the challenges faced by Sierra Leone during the elections in 2007 and 2008, as well as possible hurdles that the country may face in the future.
At the time of the interview, Alex Paila was the voter education and public relations officer at the National Electoral Commission in Sierra Leone. Prior to that, he worked as a journalist for various newspapers, including the Ceylon Times and the Spectator. He was also employed, first as a reporter and then as deputy news editor, at the Sierra Leone Broadcast Service. Paila holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication.
At the time of this interview, Victoria Stewart-Jolley was a legal adviser for the United Nations Development Programme's Electoral Assistance Team in Sierra Leone, a position that she had held since March 2007. She worked during the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections as well as the 2008 local elections to create legal frameworks for electoral management. Prior to working in Sierra Leone, she was a lawyer for the Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan. Stewart-Jolley also worked in international criminal law in Timor-Leste, and in World Trade Organization law in Indonesia. She holds a law degree and has a background in international public law and constitutional law.