Public Monitoring of Electoral Advertising

Electoral advertising

While Colombian citizens have access to information on election campaign finances reported via the 'Cuentas Claras' website, they can't compare real spending with official reports. A participatory platform allowing citizens to report on election advertising costs would therefore be a significant advancement in the transparency of electoral processes.

In the 2011 regional elections, 84,093 candidates submitted income and campaign spending reports through Cuentas Claras - a platform donated by Transparency for Colombia (TPC) - to the Election Authority in order to strengthen the transparency and accountability process of campaigns.

For the first time the public had the opportunity to access this election information in real time. According to reports, the candidates spent a total of 348 billion pesos in the elections, 34% of which was spent on advertising. However, given the constraints of time and the amount of campaign advertising, it’s possible this figure does not show the actual expenditure on advertising. We would therefore like to create a web platform to track the advertising expenses reported by the candidates, and provide citizens with tools to submit their own photographic and audiovisual reports in order to quantitatively compare this information and identify the following:

• Possible irregularities and  breaches of electoral advertising regulations -send consequential alerts to the National Electoral Council.
• A visual pollution of illegal advertising placement in non-electoral spaces.
• Data analysis that will allow citizens to analyse electoral finances.
• The best categorisation and sorting of advertising costs given electoral obstacles, standards of media and promotional material.

While we expect to track campaign reports live, this will depend on the frequency with which candidates submit their reports on income and expenses through Cuentas Claras