New Candidate Hub gives election contestants powerful interactive tools to calculate vote targets, build campaign strategies and budgets, prepare nominations, assess risks and turn an ambition to contest into a practical pathway to winning.
The Centre for Democracy & Dialogue has launched a major new suite of digital election campaign tools that it says represents a significant leap forward in how prospective candidates in Fiji can prepare to contest elections.
The Empowering Fiji’s Women in Politics Candidate Hub, formally launched today by Supervisor of Elections Ms Ana Mataiciwa, brings together electoral education, campaign planning, mentoring and a suite of nine interactive candidate tools in a single online platform designed specifically for Fiji’s electoral environment.
CDD also launched AI & Your Campaign, a new Fiji-specific toolkit preparing political candidates and campaign teams for the rapidly growing use of artificial intelligence in elections, including deepfakes, voice cloning, fabricated political content, false voter information and other forms of AI-enabled manipulation.
CDD Chief Executive Officer Nilesh Lal said the Candidate Hub was deliberately built to go far beyond conventional candidate training.
“This is not another election handbook or a collection of information sitting on a website. We have tried to build actual campaign infrastructure that candidates can use. A person thinking about contesting can now go online, assess their readiness, check their eligibility, calculate what they may need to achieve electorally, build a strategy around that target, construct a campaign budget, prepare for nomination, develop campaign messages and work through the risks they may face.”
The Candidate Hub contains six structured learning modules, covering Fiji’s political system, the electoral system, becoming a candidate, media and communications, campaign finance and legal compliance, and leadership, policy and public service. It also provides access to experienced mentors and experts in electoral administration, campaign strategy, communications, political leadership, fundraising and public policy.
Its most innovative component, however, is the suite of nine interactive campaign tools now publicly available through the platform.
Among them is the Personal Vote Target Calculator, which helps candidates translate an electoral objective into practical supporter-building and voter-contact targets, while the Campaign Strategy Builder goes considerably further by calculating the votes a candidate still needs, estimating the meaningful voter contacts required to secure them, identifying priority voter groups and issues, and testing whether the resulting strategy is achievable within the candidate’s available time, volunteer base and weekly budget. It then generates a campaign strategy that can be printed or saved.
“This is where the technology becomes really powerful,” Mr Lal said.
“Candidates often enter elections with enthusiasm, posters and social media pages, but without a mathematical pathway between where they are and the number of votes they need. These tools force a campaign to ask the difficult questions. How many votes do I actually need? How many supporters do I already have? How many people must I meaningfully reach each week? Which communities should receive my limited time? Can my volunteers deliver the strategy? Can I afford it? That moves campaigning from guesswork towards disciplined planning.”
The Campaign Budget Builder allows a candidate to build a campaign budget in seven stages, identify funding and expenditure, distinguish essential from optional spending, examine campaign-period cash flow, stress-test a reduced budget and prepare compliance records before generating a printable campaign plan.
Other tools include a Candidate Readiness Assessment, Election Timeline Calculator, Candidate Eligibility Self-Check, Nomination Readiness Checklist, Campaign Message Builder, and a dedicated Women Candidate Safety Planner.
The Safety Planner allows women candidates to confidentially assess physical, travel, online, harassment, reputational, event and wellbeing risks and build practical prevention and response measures. The platform has been designed with privacy in mind, with sensitive planning information in key tools remaining in the user’s browser rather than being stored by CDD.
While the Candidate Hub has been developed under CDD’s Empowering Fiji’s Women in Politics programme, Mr Lal said the publicly available campaign tools can also be used by all candidates and campaign teams.
“Our principal objective remains increasing the participation and electoral success of women, because Fiji’s present level of women’s representation is simply unacceptable. But better-informed candidates, better-planned campaigns and greater compliance with electoral law benefit the entire democratic process. We want political parties and candidates across Fiji to use these resources.”
Fiji-specific AI toolkit prepares campaigns for a new electoral threat
CDD said the second resource launched today addresses a challenge that election authorities, political parties and candidates around the world are increasingly having to confront.
The 20-page AI & Your Campaign toolkit explains how artificial intelligence can be used against political candidates, how to recognise and investigate potentially manipulated material, how to respond when a deepfake or other AI-generated attack occurs, and how candidates can use AI responsibly in their own campaigns.
Rather than providing general international guidance, the toolkit applies these risks directly to Fiji. It covers deepfake videos and images, voice cloning, AI-generated fake news sites, bot networks, false voter information and gendered AI attacks, and includes Fiji-specific scenarios showing candidates what to do if they are targeted.
It also introduces candidates to the SIFT verification method, provides a rapid-response framework for the crucial first hours after an AI-enabled attack, explains relevant reporting pathways and laws in Fiji, and includes a Candidate’s AI Pledge encouraging transparent and responsible use of artificial intelligence.
Mr Lal said CDD wanted candidates prepared before the first serious AI-related electoral incident occurs.
“The time to learn what to do about a convincing voice clone or deepfake is not after one has already reached thousands of voters. Political campaigns now need an AI response plan in much the same way that they need a communications plan or a finance plan. The technology has moved extraordinarily quickly, and election systems everywhere are having to catch up.”
CDD said the toolkit deliberately addresses both sides of AI, recognising the risks while also showing how candidates can use artificial intelligence ethically for legitimate activities such as preparing drafts, analysing information, translation and multilingual communication, campaign design and managing digital communications.
CDD invites political parties and candidates to use the platform
CDD is now inviting all registered political parties, prospective candidates and campaign teams to explore the Candidate Hub and approach the organisation for demonstrations, technical briefings and candidate training.
“We want every serious candidate and every political party in Fiji to know that these tools now exist,” Mr Lal said. “Political parties do not need to reinvent campaign-planning systems, and first-time candidates should not have to begin with a blank piece of paper. CDD has invested considerable electoral, legal, campaign and technical expertise into building these resources, and we are ready to work with parties and candidates on a strictly non-partisan basis.”
The Candidate Hub is available at: cdd.org.fj/efwip-candidate-hub/
The AI & Your Campaign toolkit can be accessed through CDD’s publications portal.
CDD acknowledged the support of Misereor, which has supported the development of these resources through the Empowering Fiji’s Women in Politics programme, and welcomed Misereor representative Mr Klaus Schilder to the launch.
CDD also thanked Supervisor of Elections Ms Ana Mataiciwa for officiating at the launch and acknowledged the Fijian Elections Office’s continuing engagement with civil society as preparations for Fiji’s next general election intensify.
ENDS
