What it is
Apollo is an election data management system for large-scale observation missions. It collects incoming reports from field observers, supports verification, and makes the data usable in real time — across teams that might have a few dozen people or tens of thousands.
The problem is genuinely hard. Coordinating a large distributed observer network, ensuring reports are reaching you, identifying anomalies, acting on what you're seeing as it happens — it requires purpose-built software. Apollo was built specifically for that challenge and has been deployed in production across multiple international election contexts. Apollo has been in the background quietly managing data for elections where the stakes were very real — with the future of democracy or the threat of political violence on the line.
Deployment and use
Apollo is in active use as of 2026. CoCitizen manages a running instance and is working with partners on upcoming deployments.
If your organization operates at the scale where Apollo makes sense — dozens to thousands of observers — you'll likely need some onboarding and configuration support to get started. That's not a sales pitch; it's just the reality of the software. We're happy to talk through what's involved.
Origin and credit
Apollo was created by TimbaObjects for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), with funding from USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other international donors. NDI maintains the upstream repository.
CoCitizen team members have been involved with Apollo from early in its development. CoCitizen manages an independent fork focused on public deployability.
CoCitizen's role
Our focus has been making Apollo practical to deploy outside of NDI. We created approximately 1,600 lines of Terraform scripts that automate what was previously a highly manual deployment process so more organizations can run their own instances without a dedicated infrastructure team.
CoCitizen does not control the upstream NDI repository or Apollo's election observation methodology. Much of the election-observation subject-matter expertise built into Apollo comes from NDI and the statisticians and electoral experts who shaped the system over time.
License
GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3.0). Use it, fork it, adapt it — keep the attribution and license intact.
Documentation
Code
Get involved
Contributions are welcome, particularly on deployment, documentation, and testing. Open an issue on GitHub or write to contact@cocitizen.com.
If your organization is considering Apollo for a serious observation mission and the software feels daunting, feel free to reach out. We may be able to advise, or if you need more in-depth help, individual contributors may be available for paid deployment support.