The Maldives
Last year was obviously an exciting electoral season here in the United States. But we also had the opportunity to be involved in perhaps an even more historic election in 2008: the first free presidential elections in the Maldives in a generation.
As you may know, the Maldives is a tiny archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the smallest Muslim nation in the world, and has been ruled by a dictator for 30 years, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. In 2008, free presidential elections were held for the first time in many people's lives. We had the opportunity to work with a leading candidate for president, Dr. Hassan Saeed, a former attorney general and chief justice.
The very newness of it all made it somewhat difficult to tell who was a likely voter, so the approach was to go after everyone! We set up a database containing just about every human in the country (about 350,000). Addresses in the Maldives are complex, because there are no streets or street numbers: just a house and an island. Houses have names, not numbers, rather like English country manors. And people's legal names are different from our expectations in the U.S.: a person might have three names (Abdul Abdullah Abdul), or two names (Abdul Abdullah), or even just one (Abdul). We created a custom version of Campaign Engine to handle this different structure.
In a field of 6 candidates including the incumbent dictator, Dr. Saeed ultimately achieved third place. In a runoff round, however, Mohamed Nasheed won against the dictator, and the free elections were a success.
We will continue technology consulting with Dr. Saeed throughout the year as he builds a new party from scratch in this new democracy. This has been an exciting project and I am pleased to be a footnote to history.
