The RASED for Electoral Monitoring project monitored the 2013 parliamentary elections by leading a coalition of 125 civil society organizations across the country in capacity building and election day monitoring activities. Building upon its experience in the 2007 and 2010 elections, Al Hayat gathered a broad coalition of local CSOs to monitor the administrative and legal procedures of the elections, building the capacity of their youth staff and organizing monitoring procedures that would be efficient, accurate, and reliable.
The 2013 parliamentary elections were significant as they were undertaken after a key legal reform of the electoral system and the first in the country to be overseen by the newly created Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). In the months leading up to the elections, Al Hayat and its coalition strengthened their abilities to monitor election activities, making calls for improving the electoral process at key points, working to increase the system’s credibility, and most importantly, to ensure the election was conducted freely, fairly, and with integrity and transparency. Additionally, the project sought to strengthen youth participation in the political sphere, to build youth’s capacities for election monitoring, and to encourage voter participation. The election coalition monitored the elections from beginning to end, including the following phases/activities:
- Voter registration
- Formation of voters’ lists
- Publication of voters’ lists
- Candidate registration
- Election campaign activities for parties and individuals
- The media’s integrity and responsibility during campaigns
- Voting day and polling operations
- Sorting and counting votes
The monitoring team included 4,000 youth monitors from the coalition’s vast civil society network. Al Hayat worked to train the youth in the months prior to the election on the electoral system, electoral regulations, the importance of maintaining professionalism in monitoring work, the means and tools for electoral monitoring, and the overall principles of free, transparent, and fair elections. To enable detailed and reliable monitoring work, RASED developed a set of monitoring tools and procedures specifically tailored to the Jordanian electoral context as well as mechanisms for coordinating the activities of its 4,000 monitors on Election Day.
Many reports were disseminated during the monitoring process, including a final report on the key findings of the whole process. The project was undertaken with the support of the National Democracy Institute (229,590 USD), the Canadian Embassy in Amman (50,000 CAD), and the British Embassy in Amman with 10,000 GBP.
