PAFFREL to deploy 4000 election observers

• Says decrease of violations compared to 2015 
• Two teams to monitor social media activities

People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) yesterday said a total number of 4000 officers would be deployed to observe the Presidential Election. 

Issuing a statement, PAFFREL stated 3000 observers would monitor process of insider polling stations and the rest of the observers would monitor overall activities of the election. 

PAFFREL said the number of reported election violations were lower compared to the 2015 Presidential Election. However they raised concerned behaviour of certain electronic media organisations, on which they did not provide details. 

A total of 672 elections violations were reported by 14 November, out of which the highest number of violations were unlawful election promotions, PAFFREL stated. 

PAFFREL stated they launched a separate monitoring process for social media activities for possible election violations. 

“For the first time in PAFFREL’s history, we deployed two separate teams fulltime for this task. One team is deployed to look into the pages/sites technically and the other observes the information derived out of these pages/sites for further analysis and actions. We have been covering all social media publications in all languages throughout the day,” said the statement. 

More than 11,000 pages of social media, pages of candidates, web-sites of political parties and popular and attracted pages/sites will be monitored throughout the election time, the statement said. 

According to PAFFREL, any violation on social media will be directly reported to the Election Commission to take immediate action to prevent those activities.