This reality has fundamentally rewritten the rules of what it means to win an election. It is no longer sufficient to campaign well, sell a compelling vision, and attract more votes than your opponent. In authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning environments, a modern political campaign must do three things: win the election through votes, protect the vote and prove that victory, and then navigate the transition to power through domestic, regional, and international advocacy. This applies whether you are running for President, for a parliamentary seat, or for a seat on a local council. 

This article is about the second of those key steps: protecting the vote. It is a discipline too many campaigns neglect, treating it as an afterthought rather than a core operational function. The best instrument available to campaigns for protecting the vote is a Parallel Vote Tabulation, or PVT. Sometimes called a quick count, it is the process by which a campaign independently verifies what the electoral commission is publishing, in real time, using its own data. 

A PVT is a systematic, statistically grounded process of independently collecting, recording, and tabulating election results from polling stations, parallel to the official count being conducted by the official electoral management body. When done well, it allows a campaign to know, with a high degree of statistical confidence, what the real result of the election is, before or alongside any official announcement.

But a PVT does not begin with results. A PVT begins with the election process itself, from the moment polls open on Election Day. Are polling stations opening on time? Has the presiding officer arrived, and is the station properly constituted? Are ballot boxes present? Are ballots available in sufficient quantity? Is indelible ink being used? Is the voters' roll present and accessible? These are not administrative niceties; they are the early warning indicators of an election under stress, and recording their statistical incidence across a representative sample of stations gives a campaign (and ultimately observers and courts) a granular picture of how the process unfolded before a single result is announced.

Then comes the results phase. At the close of polling, each station usually produces a results declaration form a signed, official record of the vote tallies at that station. Agents must photograph this form and transmit it, with the image as verification, to a central data hub that captures it onto a database.

PVTs often fail because of the scale of the undertaking required. Nigeria's 2023 general election involved more than 176,000 polling units. A campaign cannot always resource agents capable of transmitting results from every single station, and it does not need to. The statistical principle that underpins a PVT is the same one that underpins all credible polling: a properly designed random sample, stratified to reflect the full geographic, demographic, and political diversity of the electorate, can produce projections of the national result with a margin of error that is tight enough to be accurate. A sample of 4,000 to 6,000 polling stations, properly constructed, is sufficient in most democracies to project a result with confidence.

This has been demonstrated repeatedly. In Zambia's landmark 2021 election, civil society organisations using PVT methodology were able to confirm Hakainde Hichilema's victory with high confidence. In Nigeria, both in 2019 and 2023, PVT-style operations conducted by the civil society coalition known as the Situation Room provided data that exposed discrepancies between announced results and figures transmitted under the INEC BVAS electronic system. In Venezuela, the opposition's robust parallel tabulation operation in the July 2024 presidential election became the single most powerful tool in exposing what credible international observers described as fraudulent result manipulation by the Maduro government. The PVT did not change the immediate political outcome, but they shattered the regime's narrative internationally and provided the evidentiary foundation for sustained delegitimisation.

A well-executed PVT depends on technology that allows field agents to report incidents, upload photographic evidence, and request support quickly and simply. Technology may be the more straightforward component of a PVT, but that does not mean it can be taken lightly. The organisation must be prepared for internet shutdowns, gaps in network coverage, and other disruptions to data transmission. Contingency planning is an essential part of any PVT.

When polls close, everything happens at once, and the system must be able to cope with that surge. And where there are attempts to manipulate the election itself, there is a heightened risk that the PVT will be targeted for manipulation or outright sabotage. Cybersecurity is the more manageable side of this: DDoS attacks can be mitigated, and with cloud infrastructure, it is safe to assume that a regime will not be able to shut down the entirety of Google's or Amazon's systems.

But a PVT is also a matter of trust, and the easiest way to undermine trust is through infiltration. It is for this reason that, in a well-run PVT, every piece of information is verified by a human being. This double verification takes place under serious time pressure and carries the risk of duplication. Designing a system capable of meeting all of these requirements, while accounting for local particularities, can take as long as the organisational preparations themselves. In short: the technical system must be quick (it is, after all, a quick count), scalable, and resilient. But technology is only ever part of the solution.

Having a PVT is one thing. Deploying it strategically is another. The most important principle here is trust-building before election day. Campaigns must identify their key stakeholders - domestic observers, credible civil society organisations, accredited international observer missions, trusted diplomatic missions, and regional bodies - and bring them into an understanding of the system ahead of time. Stakeholders need to be shown the methodology, the sampling design and how the projection model works. 

Speed is the operational imperative of any PVT operation. The goal is not necessarily to publish your results before the electoral commission does. The goal is to be in a position where, if the commission announces a result that contradicts your data, you can immediately and credibly demonstrate that discrepancy to the stakeholders who matter. You are, in effect, telling the commission: we know what the real numbers are. 

Informal, off-the-record communication with observer mission leadership is often where this work is done. A quiet briefing to the head of an observation mission, showing them that your PVT data diverges materially from official figures, carries enormous weight in the statements those missions ultimately make. And those statements, in turn, shape the international response, the legitimacy of the result, and the pressure applied to the winning and losing parties in any transition negotiation.

Elections in difficult environments are not simply won on the campaign trail. They are won, protected, and certified through a layered set of processes, of which the PVT is among the most critical and most underinvested. Campaigns that build the infrastructure to prove what happened beat campaigns that merely hope it will be recognised. In the current era of democratic backsliding, having a PVT as part of your campaign is non-negotiable.

Nandor Toth is a Co-founder and Chief Data Officer at Stateless, specialising in data-driven

digital communication. He has over five years of experience delivering political technology

projects for election monitoring worldwide. 

Jonathan Moakes is the Political Director at SABI Strategy Group, a communications and

campaigning firm that has run election monitoring and protection efforts worldwide.