Q&A with Archon Fung on the MyFairElection Project

A new Web site, conceived by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Archon Fung, is designed to give voters the opportunity to rate their experiences at the polls on Election Day. The Web site, MyFairElection.com, will be updated in real time by reports filed by voters from throughout the country. Voters can register in advance to receive instructions on participation. Journalists, community groups, public officials, and even individual citizens will be able to use the online map to locate problems with our nation's election system and fix them on Election Day.

MyFariElection.com is co-sponsored by ABC News.

Fung is professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. Recent books include "Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency" (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and "Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy" (Princeton University Press).

Fung explained the origins of the project and what he hopes to do with the data.

How and when did this project get started?

I wrote a concept paper for this project this summer. There are so many ways in which private sector projects — such as Amazon.com and TripAdvisor.com — use the feedback and views of thousands of people to improve the quality of information that is available. But there are very few public efforts that utilize such "crowd-sourcing" and "wisdom of the crowds" dynamics. I was trying to think of public and democratic applications of this dynamic, and election monitoring seemed like an issue on which this approach might help.

I thought that the project would remain just an idea until a very talented software engineer named Russell Richardson in San Francisco decided to volunteer many, many hours to develop this platform. I'm still amazed at how much he has accomplished in a very short time.

What will the data be used for? Will it be a short-time or long-term project?

In the short term, I hope to use the data to help understand the scope and distribution of voting problems across the country. Gaining such insight depends upon getting a very large number of users, and the site may not get that much traffic the first time out of the gate.

In the longer term, this initial project is an experiment to learn about the potential and problems of this kind of crowd-sourced election monitoring. We don't know, for example, whether people will try to "game" the platform by filing false reports, whether there will be strong biases from particular places or kinds of people, and there are many questions about implementation and usability.

As bad as they are, election problems in the United States are quite minor compared to those of other countries. My hope is that based upon what we learn here, this kind of citizen-based popular election monitoring can help to improve the quality of democracy in many countries where democracy is more fragile.

Will users be able to see the information in real-time on the 4th so they can check on their polling places?

Definitely. Users will be able to see reports as they appear in real time on Election Day. They will be able to see the country as a whole, they will be able to zoom down to the level of individual counties, and they will be able to read the detailed comments that people submit. The platform actually allows people to post picture, and we hope that some people will do that.

Do you have any predictions for the kind of problems voters are going come up against?

Based on reports that people have filed already - absentee and early voters - some people are going to be surprised that they are not on registered voter lists. Those folks should be given - and ask for - provisional ballots. Most of the reports so far are fairly positive. Early voting seems to be a good idea.