OSCE and Ukraine’s Central Election Commission launch chatbot to ease access to information in advance of 25 October local elections

As of today, 7 October 2020, a chatbot called “CEC about elections”, is available for election commissioners on the ground, candidates and ordinary voters who would like immediate information on various aspects of the upcoming local elections in Ukraine. The chatbot is an artificial intelligence-based application, developed with the support of the OSCE Project Co-ordinator for the country’s Central Election Commission.

The chatbot provides responses tailored to the users’ needs on a wide range of questions and is available via Telegram (@cvk_elections_bot) with a Facebook Messanger version to become available at a later date.

These local elections are taking place under the recently amended legislation; the candidates are competing for offices in new administrative territorial divisions, introduced as part of the decentralization reform. This transformation delegates powers from the centre to the local level, among other changes, it combined settlements, villages and towns into 1,470 communities and changed territorial divisions from 490 smaller rayons to 136 larger ones.  

“Local officials, to be elected this autumn, will have much wider possibilities to change their communities for the better.”  noted Henrik Villadsen, OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine. “That is why it is important that every element of the electoral process is smooth, transparent and clear to everyone. We hope that the use of new e-governance tools, such as this chatbot, will help preserve and enhance trust in elections and support the legitimacy of the officials elected,” he added.

The chatbot will guide election commissioners, of various levels, to relevant instructions and legal provisions. Responses to frequently asked questions on administration of the electoral process on the ground will also be available. Candidates running for various offices will get up-to-date notifications on documents they need to provide or actions they need to take in the run-off. The chatbot also proposes a useful option of an electoral calendar, which enables advance notification of important electoral dates and deadlines.

Voters will be able to get to know the location of their polling station quickly by entering their registration address, which is important because those locations may be different from previous elections, due to recent reforms. In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, the chatbot will also inform users on the measures taken at the polling stations to ensure safety of voters, as well as advise on precautions to take while going to vote.

This effort is part of a project implemented by the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine in partnership with the Central Election Commission and with financial support from the US Mission to the OSCE, the Permanent Mission of Slovakia to the OSCE, the Government of Germany and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway.