 Hi, I'm Simon Lee, director of the Citizenship and Governance Strategic Research Area. In these chats on just society, there's no bigger question than voting in a general election. That's the essence of citizenship and governance. I'm very pleased today to be able to talk to Robert Herring, a colleague of mine in the law school, who's an expert in blockchain technology and thinking ahead about how the law and society needs to consider these developments. Could they make for a fair election? Robert, why don't you have a secret balance anyway? Or why can't I just walk in and vote without seeming to have to give identity? What's going on? Obviously if you hadn't noticed we have got general election coming up in a week's time. One of these key questions really is that you get sent through this piece of paper which says that you have to go and vote, telling you where to go and vote. On the day you go along and you essentially give your name and your postcode, you don't even really have to show the piece of paper that you've been sent through. The question is how does the person who is ticking your name off the list know that you are who you say you are? Therefore, what does that really mean in terms of the validity of your vote and the ramifications that that has for the democratic process in general? For a long time, identity has obviously been a key aspect of elections. Going back to the 19th century and before, elections tended to be held in these large public forums where people were kind of asked to say who they were going to vote for. So that would be intimidating? There was scope for intimidation there if you were stood in a public square yelling out who you were going to vote for. There was any chance that there could be someone hanging around who wanted to try and influence you to say something else. One of the big reforms that came in towards the end of the 19th century was actually to inaugurate into legislation around elections the importance of secrecy, of being able to vote in secret, to be able to not even have your family members or anyone really know or close friends. The idea was that you could do this completely in private. Obviously, the payoff for that is that then we start to have issues with identification of evidence. It's very secretive. Who do we know? Do we have a problem in the United Kingdom with fraud or it's called personation, isn't it? Personation is one of many offences that is highlighted and come through the various pieces of legislation. We have the Representation of the People Act and the Electro-Administration Act more recently, that has developed even more of the offences which are seen as problematic, but in truth there is no real problem with electoral fraud in this country. It's a very sort of a minuscule percentage. In the Conservative Party manifesto, they're talking about trying to make it fairer and in a sense more modern? The Conservative Party manifesto for this forthcoming election has picked up on a particular recommendation that was made by Sir Eric Pickles, who was a former Cabinet Minister in the Conservative Party in a report that he wrote at the end of last year which was called Securing the Ballot. He, amongst a number of recommendations, pointed towards the importance of strengthening the security of the electoral process by essentially having more robust forms of identification. We start to get back into the area of photo ID. To go back to what we were saying earlier, when you go into the polling station and you're asked to give your name and your postcode, if you don't have a polling card, the context that the Conservative Party manifesto and Eric Pickles are pointing towards is that you would actually have to show a picture of yourself in order to, for the person there to see that you are the person you think you are. Could we vote online, a bit like with your bio passport, going into some sort of boob? Would that work? Is the technology there to make that happen? Technology is most certainly there for what is essentially called either E-voting or I-voting. E-voting is when we have polling stations much like we have now, but they contain electronic voting machines. So we've seen this in America. Certainly, I mean, you might have seen a number of sort of around some of Obama's re-election. He was sort of, there were sort of press shots of him going into the polling stations and using these electronic voting machines. And yeah, and in that you're essentially, you're, it's kind of an electronic version of the kind of the paper voting system. So it's not, it's sophisticated in the sense that it can kind of compile the votes and deal with them in a sort of a slightly more sophisticated way. But it's not really developing or solving a number of the problems necessarily around. So can terrorists hack into that? Yes, exactly. So, you know, with either E-voting or I-voting, I-voting is something which is sort of, hasn't been explored quite so widely, that's essentially when you're voting from home. So online or via perhaps a mobile app or something along these lines. Estonia is a country which has really committed themselves to looking at all of these sort of different ways of being able to vote. But in that country, all the citizens are issued with an identity card. And we know that in this country there's been big question mark, so exactly. So we have to take into consideration that that system works particularly well or doesn't perhaps work particularly well, but it works, it is able to work because all the citizens have an identity card. The problem with the system for E-voting in Estonia and people who have sort of monitored this would suggest that, yes, there are a number of vulnerabilities, what is sort of called vectors where it is possible for hackers to hack into either the machines that are used for voting or at other stages where the votes are compiled and for different sort of, you know, for malware to be used and other sort of malicious attacks. So, yeah, the technology is there, but it's sort of still seen as kind of slightly problematic and not necessarily improving upon what we sort of have at present. So in the next, say, five or ten years do you think as, well, the technology might be there, do you think that we'll move down that road or do you think people actually like the pencil and put it across? Yeah, well, yeah. I don't know. I think it's very spoiling about people. Yeah, well, quite. I mean, maybe we are traditionalists in this country and we do sort of like the idea of some sort of broken pencil in a polling booth that we have to sort of try and scratch out across with on the day. But, I mean, we have to, you know, we live in a highly sort of technological society, you know. There's sort of the pace of change in these, in pretty much all walks of life is very rapid. So, and we already know that there's a great lot of interest in sort of digital solutions, I suppose, is one way of putting this. For lots of sort of things and voting is going to be one of these. I mean, there were sort of voting trials in this country, in the UK in 2007. They didn't go very well. So, that's why we really haven't seen very much of that since. My suggestion and where I'm coming at in terms of my own research is to think about blockchain technology. Now, this is a technology which has come sort of, you know, it started to make a name for itself really, but it sort of came out of what was Bitcoin technology, or Bitcoin, which is a cryptocurrency, and blockchain is a peer-to-peer system. It's a ledger which records data and fixes it at a particular moment in time. This was used for transactions in Bitcoin, so people knew that if a Bitcoin had been spent, then it couldn't be spent again. Blockchain has now kind of grown out of this, and we're seeing it being used in lots of areas of provenance. So, you know, to be able to kind of say whether a tuner has come from a particular base or whether a diamond is a blood diamond, for example. Whether your vote is genuinely yours. Exactly, and so that's why the technology performs a very fundamental process of fixing information at a point in time across a secure peer-to-peer network. And we've seen that in all these different sort of areas of provenance and voting is now one where it looks like it could be of use as well. So, I suppose the question for our students and the wider public is that the technology is there. We know that in talent shows, you can vote in some kind of sophisticated way. It seems a bit old fashioned in the general election. But how do you want to use the technology? How can we make elections fair and efficient and exciting and inclusive, which I think is important? So, final word to you, Ron. I mean, I think I'll immediately pick up on this idea of exciting. I mean, this is, you know, when we think about the way that technology intervenes in lots of areas of our life now, let's think about banking, for example. Does banking need to be exciting? Does it need to be sexy? Does voting need to be exciting? Does it need to be sexy? Some people would say yes, other people would say no. It's something about it simply being a civic duty. It's something that we perform as part of our role as citizens. It's what makes us citizens. So, in that sense, there's a big question of analogue methods. You know, kind of, you know, are we as sort of humans failing in ways that technology really can make up for. And the suggestion I think is that in some circumstances, certainly yes, in others no. I don't think there is a blanket response that can be achieved. For me, I think the crucial thing and for this series of conversations, so thank you, Rob, is for the students to be thinking about how do we create a justice society? Thank you very much, Robert Herring.