The unexpected challenges of a country's first election | Philippa Neave

The great philosopher Aristotle said

if something doesn't exist, there's no word for it,

and if there's no word for something,

that something doesn't exist.

So when we talk about elections,

we in established democracies, we know what we're talking about.

We've got the words. We have the vocabulary.

We know what a polling station is.

We know what a ballot paper is.

But what about countries where democracy doesn't exist,

countries where there are no words to describe the concepts

that underpin a democratic society?

I work in the field of electoral assistance,

so that's to say we assist

emerging democracies to organize

what is often their first elections.

When people ask me what I do,

quite often I get this answer.

"Oh, so you're one of these people who goes around the world

imposing Western democracy on countries that can't handle it."

Well, the United Nations does not impose anything on anybody.

It really doesn't,

and also, what we do

is firmly anchored in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

Article 21, that says

that everybody should have the right to choose who governs them.

So that's the basis of the work.

I specialize in public outreach.

What does that mean? Another jargon.

It actually means designing information campaigns

so that candidates and voters

who have never had the opportunity to participate or to vote

understand where, when, how to register;

where, when, how to vote;

why, why it is important to take part.

So I'll probably devise a specific campaign to reach out to women

to make sure that they can take part,

that they can be part of the process.

Young people as well.

All sorts of people.

Handicapped people.

We try to reach everybody.

And it's not always easy, because very often in this work,

I've noticed now over the years that I've been doing it

that words are lacking,

and so what do you do?

Afghanistan.

It's a country with high levels of illiteracy,

and the thing about that was, it was in 2005,

and we organized two elections on the same day.

The reason was because the logistics are so incredibly difficult,

it seemed to be more efficient to do that.

It was,

but on the other hand, explaining two elections instead of one

was even more complicated.

So we used a lot of images,

and when it came to the actual ballot,

we had problems, because so many people wanted to take part,

we had 300 candidates for 52 seats

in the Wolesi Jirga, which is the parliamentary elections.

And for the Provincial Council, we had even more candidates.

We had 330 for 54 seats.

So talking about ballot design,

this is what the ballot looked like.

It's the size of a newspaper.

This was the Wolesi Jirga ballot --

(Laughter)

Yeah, and --

this was the Provincial Council ballot.

Even more.

So you see, we did use a lot of symbols and things like that.

And we had other problems in Southern Sudan.

Southern Sudan was a very different story.

We had so many people who had never, of course, voted,

but we had extremely, extremely high levels of illiteracy,

very, very poor infrastructure.

For example -- I mean, it's a country the size of Texas, more or less.

We had seven kilometers of paved roads,

seven kilometers in the whole country,

and that includes the tarmac where we landed the planes

in Juba Airport.

So transporting electoral materials, etc.,

is exceedingly difficult.

People had no idea about what a box looked like.

It was very complicated,

so using verbal communication was obviously the way to go,

but there were 132 languages.

So that was extremely challenging.

Then I arrived in Tunisia in 2011.

It was the Arab Spring.

A huge amount of hope was generated by that enormous movement

that was going on in the region.

There was Libya, there was Egypt, there was Yemen.

It was an enormous, enormous historical moment.

And I was sitting with the election commission,

and we were talking about various aspects of the election,

and I was hearing them using words that I hadn't actually heard before,

and I'd worked with Iraqis, I'd worked with Jordanians, Egyptians,

and suddenly they were using these words,

and I just thought, "This is strange."

And what really gave rise to it was this word "observer."

We were discussing election observers,

and the election commissioner was talking about "mulahiz" in Arabic.

This means "to notice" in a passive sort of sense,

as in, "I noticed he was wearing a light blue shirt."

Did I go and check whether the shirt was light blue or not?

That is the role of an election observer.

It's very active, it's governed by all kinds of treaties,

and it has got that control function in it.

And then I got wind of the fact that in Egypt,

they were using this term "mutabi’," which means "to follow."

So we were now having followers of an election.

So that's not quite right either,

because there is a term that's already accepted and in use,

which was the word "muraqib" which means "a controller."

It's got that notion of control.

So I thought, three words for one concept. This is not good.

And with our colleagues, we thought perhaps it's our role

to actually help make sure that the words are understood

and actually create a work of reference

that could be used across the Arab region.

And that's what we did.

So together with these colleagues,

we launched the "Arabic Lexicon of Electoral Terminology,"

and we worked in eight different countries.

It meant actually defining 481 terms

which formed the basis of everything you need to know

if you're going to organize a democratic election.

And we defined these terms,

and we worked with the Arab colleagues

and came to an agreement about what would be the appropriate word

to use in Arabic.

Because the Arabic language is very rich, and that's part of the problem.

But there are 22 countries that speak Arabic,

and they use modern standard Arabic,

which is the Arabic that is used across the whole region

in newspapers and broadcasts,

but of course, then from one country to the next in day to day language and use

it varies -- dialect, colloquialisms, etc.

So that was another added layer of complication.

So in one sense you had the problem

that language wasn't fully ripe, if you like,

neologisms were coming up, new expressions.

And so we defined all these terms,

and then we had eight correspondents in the region.

We submitted the draft to them,

they responded back to us.

"Yes, we understand the definition.

We agree with it,

but this is what we say in our country."

Because we were not going to harmonize or force harmonization.

We were trying to facilitate understanding among people.

So in yellow, you see the different expressions in use

in the various countries.

So this, I'm happy to say, it took three years to produce this

because we also finalized the draft and took it actually into the field,

sat with the election commissions in all these different countries,

debated and defined and refined the draft,

and finally published it in November 2014 in Cairo.

And it's gone a long way. We published 10,000 copies.

To date, there's about 3,000 downloads off the internet in PDF form.

I heard just recently from a colleague that they've taken it up in Somalia.

They're going to produce a version of this in Somalia,

because there's nothing in Somalia at all.

So that's very good to know.

And this newly formed Arab Organization for Electoral Management Bodies,

which is trying to professionalize

how elections are run in the region,

they're using it as well.

And the Arab League have now built up a pan-Arab observation unit,

and they're using it.

So that's all really good.

However, this work of reference is quite high-pitched.

It's complex, and a lot of the terms are quite technical,

so the average person probably doesn't need to know at least a third of it.

But the people of the Middle East

have been deprived of any form of what we know as civic education.

It's part of our curriculum at school.

It doesn't really exist in that part of the world,

and I feel it's really the right of everybody

to know how these things work.

And it's a good thing to think about producing a work of reference

for the average person,

and bearing in mind that now

we have a basis to work with,

but also we have technology,

so we can reach out using telephone apps,

video, animation.

There's all sorts of tools that can be used now

to communicate these ideas to people

for the first time in their own language.

We hear a lot of misery about the Middle East.

We hear the chaos of war. We hear terrorism.

We hear about sectarianism and all this horrible negative news

that comes to us all the time.

What we're not hearing is what are the people, the everyday people, thinking?

What are they aspiring to?

Let's give them the means, let's give them the words.

The silent majority is silent

because they don't have the words.

The silent majority needs to know.

It is time to provide people with the knowledge tools

that they can inform themselves with.

The silent majority does not need to be silent.

Let's help them have a voice.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)