Dozens of Burma border-based organizations with feeds from human rights organizations and exile media launched a website to share citizen reports of widespread abuse and fraud around the first elections in Burma in 20 years. Burma Election Tracker (www.burmaelectiontracker.org) shows detailed reports, eye witness accounts, pictures and video gathered through established networks of civic organizations operating throughout Burma.

As Egypt prepared for parliamentary elections last month, Partners in Change (PIC), a coalition of 27 grassroots organizations, conducted an innovative voter education and get-out-the-vote campaign.

NDI recently partnered with pop-music star Bobi Wine to record a song that sends a message against election violence in his native Uganda. The song, composed in Lugandan and entitled “A Serious Matter,” is a mix between reggae and local African music. It is part of a campaign to encourage Ugandans to use a new citizen hotline called “Uganda Watch 2011” to voice concerns about the integrity of the electoral process surrounding polls set for February 2011.

In the decade since the founding of the Community of Democracies, which met June 2-4 in Poland, a major change has been the explosion of technology and the tools it has created, both for those supporting the free flow of ideas and other democratic values and for authoritarian states interested in the opposite, curtailing information and suppressing human rights.