Nobody trusted the election results so we built a crowdsourced validation

Hello, I wanted to share this project we suddenly built last week after the Honduran elections, it's aimed to provide transparency to the tally sheet count for the Honduran elections. The project is http://conteo.votosocial.org/ (it’s in spanish), a crowdsourced solution where we crawled the tally sheet scans from the official government platform and moved it to our own storage (in order to prevent tampering) then asked people to login with Facebook and start typing the values for each sheet, also asked 3 different people to validate each sheet. If you find an error you can correct the sheet and the validation count starts again. All changes are logged.

Honduras had elections the past November 24. We elect the president, 298 majors and 128 congressmen during the same election day every 4 years. A few hours after the voting closed the official elections institution, named TSE, presented the first results for the presidential elections having as the probable winner Juan Orlando, the candidate for the governing party Nacional with a lead of 37% then Xiomara(wife of a coup deposed presidente Mel Zelaya) with 28%.

People complained on social media that the system wasn’t counting correctly, sheets were tampered and some were ignored.

We wanted to validate ourselves, we didn’t want to have the doubt. We built it in about 24 hours of coding plus some more for testing 2 days after the election day. By Thursday in about 10 hours all sheets that we had in our power were entered by about 1.2K users, we repeated the process yesterday so we now have 96.91% of the tally sheets counted.

Up to now our results show a slightly different result but still the governing party wins the election with 35% vs 27%. Not what people expected to find a fraud in the system but at least we brought transparency to the process. We also made the code open source.

Hope you like it and feedback is welcomed!