[Photo: Mollyn Nakabea]
The Centre for Democracy and Dialogue has launched an Election Integrity Kit aimed at supporting candidates and encouraging women’s participation in politics.
The kit includes two resources: the Empowering Fiji’s Women in Politics Online Candidate Hub and the AI and Your Campaign booklet.
The online hub provides training, mentoring and expert guidance to help candidates prepare for elections.
Centre for Democracy and Dialogue Director Nilesh Lal says the hub includes interactive tools to help candidates improve their campaign prospects.
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“It contains six learning modules covering Fiji’s political system, Fiji’s electoral system, candidacy, campaign finance, leadership and policy, communication and so forth. And more importantly, it also contains practical tools which are interactive in nature and which can be used by candidates to actually improve their prospects of winning.”
Lal says the booklet addresses growing concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in elections, including fake videos, photographs and voice recordings that can mislead voters.
“This can be as mischievous as impersonating a candidate or a candidate fabricating a scandal or providing false voting information, or it can even imitate an election official. So this is the kind of threat that artificial intelligence is posing to electoral integrity in the world today.”
A two-day forum is underway to educate current and prospective candidates on the tools and how they can be used to support informed and responsible campaigning.