Can Smartphones Safeguard Democracy?

A new study by Michael Callen and James Long points in that direction. They used low-end digital cameras in Afghanistan’s 2010 parliamentary elections:

At polling stations where locally reported vote counts were digitally photographed, reports of electoral fraud were as much as 60 percent lower, and the vote counts of politically connected candidates—the ones most likely to have rigged elections—were reduced by about one-quarter.

Callen and Long found similar results in a study they conducted in Uganda's national election last year.