Center for Research Transparency and Accountability

16 December 2020

Craig Swallow

Center for Research Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) is an independent non-partisan civil society organisation dedicated to developing democratic culture and civic activism based in Serbia. Since 2016, CRTA has been responsible for observing elections in Serbia, both locally and nationally, coordinating the work of the Citizens on Watch network, aiming to improve the conditions for fair and free elections.

Business Situation

Responsible for observing elections in Serbia, CRTA was appointed to monitor and assess the quality of the process at the election for members of the Parliament of the Republic of Serbia on June 21st, 2020, reporting on election developments as well as compliance with the law and electoral processes from a random and representative sample of 500 polling stations around the country.

In order to successfully observe the elections, CRTA sought to find an employee tracking solution to monitor the movements of authorised observers arriving and leaving polling stations across the country, while meeting their Duty of Care obligation to protect those working alone.

Solution

The Vismo Global Traveller App automatically reports location fixes from a smartphone or tablet and sends the location information to the Vismo Secure Portal, enabling CRTA to view live and historic location information sent from their observers’ smartphone via the App.

Utilising the Geo-Fence functionalities within Vismo, CRTA defined the polling stations around the country and set each of them up as a Geo-Fenced area. Individual observers were then assigned to particular polling stations, which triggered Geo-Fence notifications upon the observers’ entry and exit of the polling stations.

Benefits

The patented technology of the Vismo Global Traveller App allows it to run in the background of the device while automatically reporting location fixes to the Vismo Secure Portal. This ensures that CRTA had live location updates of observers’ movements as they continued with their responsibilities for the elections with no further intervention on the app. This allowed CRTA a ‘real-time’ view of the performance of observers, which in turn assisted in proving the credibility of the election process.

The Geo-Fence notifications on observers’ entry and exit of polling stations ensured that CRTA was able to monitor observers’ arrival time at the polling stations and the length of time they spent observing the election developments and processes at each polling station. This information meant CRTA was able to effectively report on the quality of processes on election day in Serbia.

Observers also felt safer as a result of the solution, knowing that they could raise an alert that would immediately notify the CRTA, by sharing their location and audio from the incident.

The Result

Following extensive research, CRTA selected Vismo as its tracking solution provider for the elections. Deploying the Vismo Global Traveller App to 415 observers Android devices, CRTA was able to monitor their live movements via the Vismo Secure Portal throughout the election day from the preparation and opening of polling stations to their closure at the end of the day.

Commenting on Vismo

“Vismo was a key part in the success of our observations at the Parliament of the Republic of Serbia elections. Having the Global Traveller App on observers devices enabled us to monitor their live and historic movements throughout the day from the Secure Portal while receiving Geo-Fence notifications via email and SMS on an observers arrival and departure at polling stations.

Coupled with location updates, the Vismo App also has an integrated panic button for emergency situations. Although observers did not need to activate the panic button, the functionality provided peace of mind that if observers were in a crisis situation they were able to effectively and covertly notify us of the situation.”

Raša Nedeljkov, Program Director, CRTA