On January 14th, 2025, the Open Knowledge Foundation brought together leading voices from around the world to reflect on the Super Election Year 2024, during which 3.7 billion people voted in 72 countries. This online event, part of the The Tech We Want initiative, examined the profound role of technology in electoral processes, its potential, and its pitfalls, and was a continuation of the Digital Public Infrastructure for Electoral Processes roundtable discussions we held in 2023.

The event featured nine experts who shared their regional perspectives and actionable insights:

Alejandra Padilla, journalist at Serendipia, recounted Mexico’s innovative use of technology, particularly online voting for citizens abroad. However, she highlighted the complications that arose, such as thousands of registrations being rejected due to technical issues and user errors. This case exemplified how tech, while aiming to simplify voting, can unintentionally create barriers. Alejandra also shared Serendipia’s project using AI to summarize candidate platforms and help voters identify alignment with their own views, illustrating how technology can empower informed decision-making.

Emmanuel K. Gyan, from Fact-Check Ghana, shared insights from Ghana’s elections, where misinformation and disinformation were widespread, especially through social media. He highlighted initiatives like setting up situational rooms to counter false narratives in real-time. However, challenges such as limited access to fact-checking tools and the cost of combating disinformation were significant hurdles. Emmanuel emphasised the importance of holding accountable those deliberately sharing fake news in order to deter future incidents.

Juan Manuel Casanueva, Executive Director of SocialTIC, explored the gap between technological ambitions and realities in Mexico. He pointed out issues like incomplete or unreliable candidate data and the need for standardised, comparative election results data. Civil society stepped in to address these gaps by creating tools and databases, such as verifying candidate information and visualising historical election data. He warned us about the growing influence of pseudo-journalists and influencers spreading political misinformation.

Julia Brothers, Deputy Director for Elections at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), presented a global perspective, acknowledging progress in areas like voter registration technology and open election data. However, she stressed that public confidence and trust remains a significant challenge. Julia noted that election technologies are often vendor-driven rather than problem-driven, leading to transparency and accountability deficits. She highlighted that more often than not, technology is developed in a way that is not solution-oriented, but rather adding extra problems – something that deeply resonated with the way we are thinking about technology at OKFN and our initiative The Tech We Want. Her call to action included better public communication about the scope and limits of election technologies to address this issue of trust..

Miazia Schüler, researcher at AI Forensics, focused on the risks posed by generative AI in elections. Her investigations, for example on the French Elections, revealed errors and inconsistencies in AI-generated election-related content, posing threats to voter trust. She noted that AI was increasingly used to create disinformation, such as AI-generated images dramatizing political narratives. Miazia called for robust safeguards, stricter content moderation, and transparency to mitigate risks associated with generative AI in political campaigns.

Narcisse Mbunzama, Open Knowledge Network Hub Coordinator for Francophone Africa, shared lessons from the DRC’s elections, where technology improved voter registration but also revealed vulnerabilities. In a context where trust in democratic institutions is low, centralized control over election servers raised concerns about data manipulation. Narcisse highlighted the need for decentralised and transparent systems to ensure accountability and trust.

Oluseun Onigbinde, from Open Knowledge Nigeria, discussed how technology can decentralise access to election data, empowering civil society to act as a check on governmental irregularities. However, he cautioned against the misuse of tech, citing examples of cybersecurity vulnerabilities and data privacy issues in Nigeria’s elections. Oluseun advocated leveraging informal influencer networks to counter disinformation effectively. He also underlined the importance of speed and influence in combating misinformation

Setu Bandh Upadhyay, Open Knowledge Network Hub Coordinator for Asia, reflected on elections across Asia, where platforms like TikTok amplified foreign narratives and misinformation, particularly in multilingual contexts. He highlighted the lack of tools like CrowdTangle that once helped researchers track disinformation trends. Setu also raised concerns about internet shutdowns, which disproportionately impacted marginalized communities, including incidents of voter suppression and violence.

Sym Roe, CTO at Democracy Club, provided insights from the UK, where traditional forms of misinformation, such as misleading newspaper articles, remain a problem. He highlighted that disinformation is not solely a modern problem linked to new technologies—although they undoubtedly amplify its reach—but rather a challenge that has existed for centuries, dating back to the very origins of the press. He noted the retreat of social media companies from proactive election engagement, leaving civil society to fill the gaps. Sym called for a renewed focus on producing positive information to counter misinformation, rather than solely reacting to disinformation.

The event was introduced by OKFN Tech Lead, Patricio del Boca, and moderated by the International Network Lead, Sara Petti.

A Call to Action

The speakers highlighted both the potential and the perils of technology in electoral processes. Their collective insights emphasised the urgent need for:

• Greater transparency and accountability in election technologies.
• Stronger safeguards against generative AI misuse.
• Equitable resources to combat disinformation globally.
• Collaborative, scalable solutions to make technology accessible and impactful.

About the initiative

The Tech We Want is the current technological vision of the Open Knowledge Foundation. We are advocating for open, long-lasting, resilient and affordable technologies that are good enough to solve people’s problems, and for open and fair governance mechanisms and tools to truly democratise Data and AI.

In October 2024 we launched this initiative with a highly successful two-day online summit, where we tried to imagine together with key experts and activists new ways of developing tech, a kind of tech that is a common good, developed with and for the community, maintained with care, sustainable for the people and the planet, and built to last.

The summit featured 43 speakers from 23 countries in 14 hours of live streaming followed by 711 participants. We also gave space and context to 15 project demonstrations and featured major influencers from the civic and government space working at the intersection of technology and democracy.

The full documentation of the summit is gradually being published on our blog. You can follow the hashtag #TheTechWeWant on social media platforms to keep up with the new activities that will unfold over the coming months.