 My name is Taha Ali, title of my talk is Elections, Technology and the State perspective from Pakistan. Sorry I can't be here in person for this talk, but I hope you find this interesting and worth your time. A bit of introduction about myself. So I am from Pakistan. I'm an assistant professor at NUST in Islamabad, National University of Sciences and Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering. My PhD is in network security from the University of New South Wales in Australia. And then I followed this up with a postdoc in 2014 in specifically looking at next generation electronic voting systems. I've also got a background in cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. And since 2016, so I've been in Pakistan since 2016 and I've been involved in the national activity on electronic voting. So there has been frantic activity over the last five, six years and we stand at a pivotal point in time. And so I've written, I've authored research papers on this topic. I've written, in fact, one of the highlights of my career was a contribution to a book, which my research group was instrumental in putting together my new passive research group. So this is real world electronic voting. So this brings together all the latest research on the new systems that are being built secure secure and verifiable systems, which use cryptography. I've written newspaper articles. I've been part of several government committees. I've authored reports which have influenced the discourse. So my goal here in this talk is to bring you up to speed and what is happening in Pakistan. Like I said, there has been frantic activity over the last six years and we are now at a historic point. Actually, I'll get into that in a bit. And I hope to give you a personal perspective as a more of an insider account so you can see things from the inside. And many of these things should probably already know, but some of them will still be shocking for you or illuminating. And there are lessons to be learned here for developing countries because from what I've read and what I've seen, election technology experiences in developing countries tend to have a lot of things in common. And you know what they say that those who do not read history often end up repeating it. We have actually repeated history. We have repeated the mistakes made by other countries and we might end up doing that again. So it's good to talk about these things so that people know and people find out and they can think more clearly. So a bit of humor history repeats itself. Yes, and every time it does the price goes up and this actually happens to I can testify to this from personal experience. So anyway, so before we get into what is happening on the ground here, I'd like to clarify my stance. And this I believe is the stance of the majority, the overwhelming majority of the election technology community today to which I belong, which is that technology can be a viable and promising option for elections. It can be very useful. It has several good qualities, advantages, but deployments must not be done in haste. When you approach election technology, you have to exercise caution and skepticism because what happens is that when you bring in technology to fix a problem, the technology can end up creating problems itself and sometimes those problems can outweigh the initial problem. And then what people tend to do is they tend to bring in more technology to fix those problems and you get into this vicious circle spiral of sorts. So this is this is well known. There are lots of papers written on this. This is well known in the literature if you look at any expert, any handbook on expert guidelines or best practices for elections. The one thing they make clear is don't rush into this. Do your homework, go slow, scale up gradually, address challenges as they arise. So, and then so that is what I'm saying here as well, and that a new technology should be deployed for transparency and security things like verifiable voting risk limiting audits. I believe there are calls in India for these as well. You've probably already heard so much issues talk at this forum. Great care effort and deliberation is required for the ecosystem so technology requires an ecosystem around it. So you have lots of things around it. There are human factors, socio-political things, dispute resolution mechanisms, how to handle technologies, procedures and lots of things. And this effort is often underestimated. Sometimes the effort and costs of the ecosystem can actually outweigh those of the technology itself. So this has to be factored in and there is a critical lack of expertise and processes in Pakistan. So no one knows anything about election technology. Absolutely no one. There is and this is pretty much in many countries, unfortunately, and we do not have more important. We lack the processes to talk about election technology like we lack the forums and we lack the knowledge of how to go about building our expertise. And we are often in denial, at least from what I've seen over the last six years, almost all the stakeholders I've talked to, they are in denial that this gap even exists for them. Elections is just an IT problem. Bring an IT to fix it. Yes, but IT doesn't fix it. Okay, fine. Bring in blockchain that will fix it. So we need to confront these challenges. We need to take ownership of them. We need to recognize them and then we need to address them and they can be addressed. That is what I believe as well. So that is my stance and that is the stance I'll take throughout this talk. So the turning point for Pakistan for elections in Pakistan was 2013. So the prior elections, elections prior to 2013, we've had quite a few were, they were problematic, but they were mostly peaceful. And there were low stakes, low stakes in the sense that you had to two political parties and they would just swap every election. They were just, it would be one or the other. And you knew that and there would be some rigging, but it wasn't too much or it wasn't too obvious. The 2013 polls were historic, historic for three reasons. The first reason was that this was the first in all of Pakistan's 70 plus years of history. This was the first election where you were having a transition from a democratically elected government to another democratically elected government. Before that, what had happened was that either democratic governments had been overthrown by military coups. Or what happened is that the president would dissolve the assemblies and basically dissolve the government at call for new elections. This was the first transition from democracy to democracy. So this was historic in that sense. The second reason was that for the first time, the pattern of the two, the two-party pattern was broken. A third party had emerged and this was the Pakistan Tehran staff, which was led by Imran Khan. You might know the former cricketer philanthropist and a very charismatic and new faces. And he completely galvanized the discourse. They changed everything and there was this wave of change, the daily, which was due to come. So everyone was very excited. And that's why we had a 55% voter turnout in these elections, which is again historic. I think this was the largest turnout since the 70s. So this was a big deal. And the third reason why these polls were historic also was because these elections were a nightmare. In terms of how they were conducted and the rigging and the fraud. So let me get into that. So the election watchdog body. So these were the most controversial elections we've had also in 40 to 50 years. So the election watchdog body at the time, Fafan, free and fair election network, they've done some fantastic work in Pakistan. They recorded some over 71,000 irregularities. And this had, there were all sorts of irregularities. There was weak polling station management, polling staff were doing things they should not be doing ballot boxes, breach of protocols. Ballot boxes were being brought in and the seals were already broken. There was ballot stuffing. Some constituencies recorded more votes cast than actual voters on the election rolls. There were over 288 recorded incidences of violence. Some of it was severe. Some people were killed. There was poor results management. I'll get into the result management in a bit. This was a big factor in what happened. So people, the polling workers were submitting precinct results on handwritten on paper, normal pieces of paper, not on the letterhead or the actual forms. And the forms which were supposed to consolidate the precinct level results. In many cases, the totals did not add up. In some cases, the seals were missing. The signatures were missing. There was no provenance or no accounting for how these forms were managed. It was a nightmare. So right after the elections, there were allegations of massive organized rigging. 21 political parties claimed that the rigging had happened. The election tribunals were packed with complaints. They were overflowing with complaints. Then a whistleblower emerged from within the election commission who said that yes, massive rigging, lots and lots and lots of rigging. The chief election commissioner resigned. And later on he revealed that he resigned because the judiciary would not let him investigate these claims of massive rigging. The NADRA chairman resigned. So NADRA is our, is the national database registration authority. So they manage the, they assist the election commission with technology matters and they maintain and with the electoral roles. They assist them and they had a role in designing the election protocol. The chairman was a very active figure. He tried to investigate this fraud himself. He held a few press conferences. Then in the middle of the night, he was fired suddenly by the government. And he went to the Islamabad High Court and he got his job back. But then he claims he started to receive threats. He and his family. And so he resigned and left the country. So this was a complete disaster and you had failures at almost every possible level. It was a collapse. Your election administration collapsed. Your checks and balances collapsed. The dispute resolution mechanisms collapsed. The judicial mechanisms collapsed. Parliament refused to investigate. So the tribunals were packed with complaints, but it was, it started to take years. It took almost months and months up to a year for the complaints. And they were still not resolved because that system, that process itself was broken. So Pakistan, Tehrik-e-Nsaaf, again, Imran Khan's party, they decided to do something about this. And they released a white paper of 2100 pages with evidence, affidavits, copies of the forms, lots and lots of evidence. And then after one year of basically exhausting all possible avenues to get redressed, they decided to launch a political movement to get an investigation into what happened. So they launched the Freedom March, Azadi March, and they started with protest rallies in larger cities, in large cities, and then culminated in a sit-in in Islamabad. And this, again, was a historic sit-in. This was the largest sit-in in Pakistan's history. It got worldwide attention. The people actually lived there. They set up tents and trailers right in front of parliament. And they would sleep there. They would cook food there. Every day people from Islamabad would go over to join them in solidarity. There would be speeches. The entire news cycle, 9 to 5 media cycle was completely disrupted. It was focusing on those protests. There were speeches every night, fiery speeches. So things were at a fever pitch. And this protest was so huge, it cost estimated losses of $5 million. Afterwards, it was discovered in terms of lost productivity and stalemate. So there was a stalemate because the key demand of the protesters was that the prime minister should resign. And then there should be an independent investigation into what went wrong in the elections. And the prime minister on the other hand, Nawaz Sharif, he said that, all right, you can have your independent investigation, but I'm not going to resign. And this went back and forth for quite a while and neither party was budging. Then the stalemate was broken. A terrorist attack happened in 2015. This was on the army public school and it was allegedly the Taliban. They burst in and there were 150 casualties, almost all of them students and teachers. And this was horrific, the attack itself. And overnight, the entire discourse changed. And the Pakistan Terikin Saab, they called off the sit-in in the interest of, as a show of national solidarity with the government and they both, the government and the opposition, they got together to tackle terrorism. But they made it clear that this matter was not over. And shortly afterwards, the Judicial Inquiry Commission was formed to investigate these rigging allegations. And side by side, a parliamentary committee was working on electoral reforms. So this is what was happening. Then the Judicial Commission did an inquiry and they cleared the elections. This was surprising. It was not a very satisfying result. But the conclusion they drew was that elections are definitely broken. They said the opposition parties were justified in calling for an investigation. It was very justified. But while there were problems and incidents, there was no proof of necessarily what you can call organized rigging. So there was a bit of semantics here as well. And they said that yes, by and large the elections did sort of reflect the public will. And the spotlight then turned from rigging, it turned on to the election commission. The report made clear that the election commission had failed here. They had failed to administer the elections. They were the weakest link in the chain. They had failed to have any accountability. They had completely failed. And in response to this, then the parliamentary committee came out with the elections reform bill of 2017. And this bill was designed to empower the election commission to make it more independent and autonomous. So they were now given the powers of a high court and they were given greater freedom in terms of flexibility for financial matters in terms of administrative rights and duties. And the bill also called for a transparent results management system. Because one thing that had emerged in this judicial commission in the inquiry was that this result management system, this had failed catastrophically. So what happens in Pakistan is you've got these precinct level camps, which are documented in what we call form 14. Every precinct, when the polls close, they document their totals in a form 14. And then these forms are collected at the district level and their totals are organized in something called a form 19. And as per the election commission's protocol after the elections, they were supposed to post all of these forms online so that everyone could see there was transparency into what was happening. But the judicial commission found that about 30% of Pakistan's form 14s were missing. They could not be accounted for. We didn't know where they were. And this was scandalous. I mean, this was catastrophic. And then several of the form 19s, their totals did not meet with what did not match what the form 14s were saying. So there was a big fiasco. And so they called for a transparent results management system. And this bill also called for piloting electronic voting machines and biometric voting machines. And this was the time that I also returned to Pakistan in 2016. And I contributed a couple of articles to this discourse. And this was the same stance that yes, machines have a lot of advantages, but they do not solve all your problems. And there is a lot of technology fetishization involved here, which we have to be careful about. And then I talked a bit about mistakes other countries have made and so on and so forth. And then the ECP election commission of Pakistan, they reached out to certain universities in Islamabad for a potential collaboration R&D to modernize Pakistan's voting systems. And I was part of these discussions that we met for like almost a year and we hammered out action plans and things like these. But then those talks fizzled out for some reason or the other. And then the attention shifted to internet voting for overseas citizens. So this time again, the Pakistan Tariq and staff took the lead. They went to the Supreme Court and they petitioned the Supreme Court to order the election commission to empower to enfranchise overseas citizens using internet voting. Now Pakistan's constitution does allow for overseas citizens to vote. It is recognized as a fundamental right. The moral argument here is that Pakistan, a big bulk of Pakistan's GDP is actually depends on the remittances sent by these overseas workers to Pakistan. And therefore there should at least have some representation in Parliament. So that was the argument. But for a very long time, the argument put forward by the election commission was that we don't have the means to do this. So they tried piloting postal voting and telephone voting, but those mechanisms, according to their reports, had failed. And they said that internet voting is not reliable yet. So the Supreme Court then asked Nadra, again the database authority, to, can you help with an internet voting system? Nadra said, yes, we can. So in 10 weeks, they put together something called I vote, an internet voting system. And the Supreme Court unveiled this system in 2018, about five months before the election. They called in civil society, the politicians, all the stakeholders, academia, the media, and the system was unveiled. And this was called I vote. And at that meeting, the academics, including myself, we raised a vigorous protest. We said that this system, from what we can see, it seems to be repeating all the mistakes made by earlier systems. And it seems that the people who have made this system, they're not aware that all such systems in the past have failed. They have failed in very, very obvious ways. And I can see from the screen that, from the PowerPoint presentation that is presented that this system has those same mistakes. In fact, one of the things that I talked about was that I vote, if someone had bothered to Google I vote, you would discover that I vote is actually the name of Australia's system, which was the largest internet voting system at the time. And that had failed. And it had failed. And this system was basically using the same model. So based on these discussions, the Supreme Court then set up an internet voting task force to assess the system and check if it was ready to use in the elections, if it was suitable for use. And I was part of this task force as well, along with other technologists, people from other universities, from provincial technology boards. And we were given 45 days to look at the system. So there's just a brief summary of our findings, the main findings. So the obvious hiccup which everyone is aware of, I hope, is that when you take voting outside of the polling booth into some remote setting, then there is no privacy. You cannot guarantee that a person will vote a certain way. For instance, I might be standing here. I might force my wife to vote a certain way. My wife might force me to vote a certain way. So an employer might force his employee to vote a certain way. And these fears are not unfounded in the sense that what happens, Pakistan's overseas diaspora, a lot of it is concentrated in the Middle East. And in the Middle East, the relationships between employees and employers are very complex. The employers are usually Middle East citizens, citizens of Middle East countries, and they hold the passports of their employees. That's the normal practice. And they are able to force them to work in certain conditions which others object to, which people find objectionable. So there is a lot of pressure there, and there is a lot of potential for this kind of coercion, voter coercion. And then we found certain very standard flaws which are not surprising at all. We found that we could do phishing attacks. We could send emails pretending to be the election commission which reroute the voters, legitimate voters to our websites which look like election websites. And basically we steal their votes and their voting credentials. This has happened in the past for a long time. People, companies have pretended to be government websites, Pakistani government websites for a long time. And it has proved very, very difficult for government bodies in Pakistan to get these websites down because they're based overseas. And this has been happening for a long time. Then there's the standard man in the middle attack. In fact, what happens here is that, so a standard practice when you set up a website or a web service is that to prevent denial of service attacks, you don't route website traffic directly to your website. You route it through a filtering service like Cloudflare or Akamai. And they have very large data centers. So if there's a lot of spam and malicious traffic coming in, they filter it out and then they send you the useful traffic. And that is what this voting system did as well. But as researchers have found in the past that when you use this kind of solution, then you are trusting this body, this middle body, this middle man, to actually look at your votes to maybe even change them and then forward them on to you. And you don't have visibility into this process. And many of these organizations like Cloudflare, they're not based in Pakistan. Their servers are overseas. They're subject to foreign laws and foreign jurisdictions. So we don't have this kind of control over them. And elections are sensitive. You can do other things. You can entrust other activities, but not critical activities to this kind of a setup. And then we found certain very careless flaws. We found one for two flaw, which is a bit eye-opening. So basically, when you log on to the system, you can cast two votes. As an overseas voter, I can vote for one National Assembly seat and one Provincial Assembly seat. Let's say I've got National Assembly NA 125 and Provincial Assembly 35, PA 35. NA 125, PA 35. But if I go into my browser and I click Inspect Elements and I open up the raw HTML code, then within minutes I can make changes. It literally takes two minutes. And then I can vote for any two seats of my choice, like let's say NA 250, two votes, gone and confident. And this was shocking. And basically, there was no security sensibility. Basically, you had two people who had done some IT work in the past. They had met and they decided, oh, let's build a voting system. And this is the kind of voting system you would get in this case. There was no security sensibility. Obsolute components had been used, old database technologies which had been hacked, captures which had already been broken. And what was really eye-opening to me was that there was no homework done in this case. Now, this system was going to be the largest voting system, largest internet voting system in the world. The largest voting system before this, the Australian voting system, the iVote, had catered to about two to three hundred voters at that time. Two to three hundred thousand voters, two to three hundred thousand. This was going to cater to six to seven million voters. So this is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest. But you haven't even done any basic homework. You haven't even climbed some neighborhood hill or the Margala Hills of Islamabad. You have no idea. You have no background in this area. Now you're suddenly within five months, with four months to go, you want to ascend Mount Everest. So this was eye-opening to me that this kind of gap, cognitive dissonance existed. And then there was no recognition that there was an ecosystem involved in this process. For instance, we had interviews with all of the stakeholders. So we went to the people who built the system and we said, all right, so this system has this component, this component and this component. Who's going to take care of this component? Who's going to take care of this? Where is this going to be housed? Who's going to talk to who? What are the procedures? What are the security clearance is going to be? Who are the people? How many employees do you have? None of that homework had been done. They thought that, all right, we've got this thing up and running. That's it. Now somehow everything is going to fix itself or we can fix it at the last minute. And this was shocking to me as well. And then the worst thing was that there was no concept of best practices, standard practices. Like I'm sure there are many technologists here who are listening to the stock and for instance, when you go to build a house, you don't just start, you don't bring the bricks and you start building the house. First you go to an architect and you come up with a blueprint, right? A map, an architectural diagram. And this blueprint has all the details of the house. It has the doors, the number of rooms, the height, the width, everything. So you can actually see the house before this bit. And in the development community, the equivalent we have is something called a software requirements specification. Before you build a piece of software, you document the essential features of that software. So that later on, if you have a dispute, you both parties have this to refer to that. All right, I was supposed to do this and I did this. And then you can also visualize what you're going to get the output, right? Now this, this is a standard practice. We teach it at university. Every person who makes every student who makes a final year project, the first thing you do does has to submit an SRS. But in this case, this was a 150 million rupees project. There was no SRS. There was no recognition of the need for an SRS. So we were really at rock bottom. And so our recommendation, the committee's recommendation was that, in fact, let me see if I have that up. Okay, no, I don't. So the committee's recommendation, we wrote a detailed report on this. And our recommendation was that the election commission of Pakistan invest on a critical basis. They invest in a research and development wing so that they could come up. They could look at new technologies. They could look at best practices. They could guide the national discourse. They could basically provide, they could inform the discourse. Right now, everything was going in the dark. We literally had the case of the blind leading the blind. That's one intellectual call to that. He said, in most policy, we actually have the scenario is it's blind leading the blind. And this is an unfortunate reality. And this is not just specific to Pakistan. This is a common problem across the developing world. And if you look at election technology experiences in the developing world, most of those are just white elephants. You bring in very expensive technology and then you realize it doesn't work. And there are even worse stories than this. I think it was Namibia or Nigeria. One of these countries, so they got these very fancy biometric, yes, sorry, it was Kenya. They got very fancy biometric voting machines, which was state of the art top of the line, and then they deployed them. And then on election day, they discovered that all right, the batteries have run out and these plugs, the polling places aren't equipped with power sockets. So we can't really run these machines. And in midday, they had to switch to... So this is basic, the homework that needs to be done when you try to deploy technology. The technology itself is one component. The ecosystem is generally ignored, and that can prove fatal. So this, we delivered this report in 2018 and in 2019 and 2020, activity started again towards getting an election technology system up and running. In 2020, so I was asked to join several committees, lots and lots and lots of committees. And basically, I must have attended over 100 meetings, at least 150 meetings. I mean, there were days when every week, every day of the week, we were having meetings. It was either this ministry, that ministry, president subcommittee, this forum, that forum, and I was giving talks on what we should be doing, how should we, we should be going ahead. And so at that point in time, so the message I was giving, I've made dozens of presentations, dozens and dozens, like I've given lots of presentations, but I've actually physically prepared dozens and dozens of PowerPoint slides for this audience, that audience, this topic, that topic. And the message was consistently the same, that there is a lot of homework to do, and we must not underestimate election technology, we must not rush into it. But unfortunately, I was not having much luck and bit by bit, I was gently nudged out of all of these committees. So at first people would be very receptive to what I had to say, but then when it became clear that this was a colossal amount of effort, literally a mountain of effort, then people would start to start on the whole idea. And so this is how the meetings would normally go. So almost 99.99% of the time would be spent on high level discussions and thought experiments and there would not be, we wouldn't have any, the discussions would generally not be rooted in actual ground realities of election technology or the complexities, we would not be discussing new technologies, there would be no talk of risk limiting audits or hard to build machines and developing indigenous expertise. There have hardly been any pilots conducted, there has been no capacity building, no talk of best practices. So we are still where we were three years ago in 2018 when we submitted our report on eye voting. And basically where we were then was basically where we were at least 10 years ago. In terms of the global experience, I think we're still at, in the early 2000s. So 10 to 15 years. So this is where we are today. So all of these meetings, there were some positives. I met some very interesting people. That's how, in fact, that's how I discovered the Hazgeek community. We've started some nice collaborations. I discovered some people reached out. We authored some research papers. We, in fact, a few of us, we managed to raise research funding. So now we have the semblance of a research group that myself and two or three students of mine, sorry, a handful of students, some working on a volunteer basis. So now we have a small community where we are actually doing, we're trying to start on the big homework assignment that has to be done for election technology. I've written lots and lots of articles on this. I've, they have thankfully had some, they've managed to make a dent in the national discourse. Now there is talk of an ecosystem. Nadra has recognized that there is something called end-to-end verifiable voting. So that is good. But there is still this huge gap. Like in Pakistan, we still do not have any organization or any entity which can talk authoritatively about election technology. We don't have this. So we are not that organization. So my research group, we've tried to make a start at this by, we've launched a web presence on Twitter called pivot promoting innovative voting technologies where what we try to do is we try to comment or provide, we try to deconstruct or break down what is happening in the election technology ecosystem. In fact, we post, we post stories of interest to Pakistan. For instance, we posted on the news articles on the Russian voting system that failed the Moscow blockchain based voting system, which elections I think happened month, last month. And last week, I vote, Australia's I vote system again collapsed in mid-election. So we sort of try to raise awareness about these things and point to the way forward. And then last month, we had a landmark development again. So the government actually amended the Elections Act 2017. And now they have mandated the deployment of electronic voting machines and internet voting in the next general elections of 2023. So that's about a year and a half away. So this is where we are. Like I said, this is a historic point. We are at a crossroads. So the government is convinced that... So this amendment is extremely controversial. The opposition parties resisted it vigorously. The election commission resisted it vigorously. Civil society organizations, election watchdog bodies, they advised against it. Only the government was behind it. And the government managed to bulldoze it through parliament. They had the numbers, so they managed to pass it. And apparently they are convinced. From my dealings with them, I believe they are convinced that this is the way forward. This is also a failure of the election technology community of people like myself. We have failed to convince the government that... So when you have large scale deployments of election technology, typically it takes at least four to eight years to scale up to fully. And this is two such deployments. So if these deployments happen, this will be perhaps the largest deployment of internet voting in the world. And it will be the second or third largest deployment of machines in the world. And with this kind of a setup, if you're rushing into projects like these, national infrastructure projects on a global scale, you would expect that there would be tons of homework. There would be a whole bookshelf filled with feasibility studies, pilot reports, manuals, design specifications, environmental impact studies, procedural mechanisms, legal requirements, all sorts of things, commentaries. But there is nothing. There is no paperwork on this, nothing at all. So this is historic. So now we're at a point where we have to decide, Pakistan has to decide, are we going to... What are we going to do? Are we going to challenge this in court? The election commission might challenge this amendment in court. The opposition might challenge it in court and get a stay or at least a delay. The election commission might decide to go ahead. They might bring in all these machines. Then we might be set up for another Kenya-type disaster where we haven't done the homework and then we have a catastrophic systems failure on election day, which is in the whole world and see what is happening. Or this could be the start of a healthy engagement with technology and we're going to decide that all right now we're going to get our act together. We're going to invest in R&D. We're going to go step by step. We're going to follow this process through to the end. And this is actually the reason I'm not able to deliver this talk in person. I'm part of the election commission's technical... They have a technical committee and we have a meeting at the time of this talk. It's one of these critical strategy meetings. So I have to attend and we're formulating policy. I would request all of you to pray for us, let's see what happens. So the estimated cost of this deployment of just the electronic voting machines is about 150 billion rupees for nationwide deployment. So we cannot afford to get something like this wrong. But the reality is, as I have explained, we have no homework and we've got only one and a half year. No country has been able to deploy to this scale in one and a half year. No country that I know of. So anyway, that is where we are. And this is, I believe, a failure of the election technology community. And so I'm about to wrap up. What I want to talk about is that there is this big disconnect between our community and the general public, the stakeholders. For the stakeholders, there is no problem. Election technology is not a big deal. The most obvious question I get is if I can bank online, why can't I vote online? And election technology is simply an IT problem. That's how people see it. And this is how they see it in the West as well. Up until very recently, this is what if you went to the U.S. states, they have state-level election boards in the United States. And if you talk to their administrators, they say, yeah, just election technology. It's an IT problem. Let's bring in the IT people. And then many of these meetings, the commissions, I showed you a long list of committees that are joined, they would have a small technical group. I would be part of that technical group. But the other people would always be an IT expert, a software developer, or an electronics expert. Some of them would be very good people I have great respect for. But they would have no inkling of what election technology is and what haven't done. They would have no idea of the failures of the Australian system, the Estonian system, what went wrong in Kenya, what went wrong in Germany, the Netherlands. They have no idea. They haven't read about the hacks into the Indian voting machines. They don't know who many of these people are. So there is this big disconnect. And I would have to spend a lot of time trying to explain that, no, this is like, if you want to launch a space program or if you want to build a nuclear power plant or you don't bring in an IT person or a database person to advise you on space technology, right? Likewise for election technology, you need to build this expertise or at least bring in consultants or experts who can advise in this domain. But the whole point was that, oh, no, IT can fix it. And then these buzzwords, AI and blockchain made everything worse because, oh, the point of view would be, oh, if it can't be fixed for IT, let's bring in blockchain. That will definitely fix everything. And that would obviously, this would be very, very frustrating for me for a long time. Only recently I've started to get over this and see it as an opportunity. But what I want to get across is that this communication gap is very genuine. It is very real. And people like us who are working in this domain who want to help with election technology in our respective countries, our first goal should be to bridge this gap. And I'll tell you how I have had some luck in bridging it. And maybe that can help you as well. So this is a cartoon which you've probably seen it before, which is pretty much along the same lines. So aircraft designers, when you talk to them about airplane safety, they say, yeah, but the chances are very low. It's wonderful. It's super safe. And if you ask people who build elevators, the engineers say, oh, yeah, the elevators are perfect. They're nearly incapable of falling. So software engineers about computerized voting, electronic voting, they say, oh, no, no, that's terrifying. Don't ever do that. And then when you get into more details, they say, yeah, don't trust voting software. Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe. We are terrible at what we do. Everything will go wrong if you use electronic voting. And then you say, oh, but blockchain takes care of everything. They say, no, no, no, no, keep away from it, bury it in the desert, wear gloves. It's all wrong. It's all wrong. So this gap is very, very real. So I've started to see it as an opportunity. If someone says, if I can bank online, can I vote online? I ask them to sit down and then I give me five minutes of their time. And then I go into what the difference between banking online and voting online is. And I believe that if you can explain this properly to the other side, if you can connect with them on this, if you can convince them of this, that these are different problems, then things become much easier. And then you have a real chance of impacting the mainstream consciousness. And the way to do that is you talk about how banking online is different from voting online. And this is how it is really different in that when you bank online or when you use an ATM machine, everything is logged. Everything has to be logged. The moment you slide in the card, that is logged. Your password is logged. The moment you make a transaction, the amount is logged. The interbank mechanism, the movement of the money that is logged, everything is logged. And it has to be logged. It has to be logged so that the money can be protected. So if something goes wrong, you can raise a complaint, you can even get your money back. If your account gets hacked, the funds can be traced. So you have to have logging. Everything has to be fully recorded. Otherwise the system falls apart. But you can't do that with elections because when you start recording things in elections, you forfeit the privacy of the vote. Because when you cast a vote, all identifying information is stripped away from the vote. And this has to be because privacy is the fundamental principle, the bedrock of free and fair elections. It is in the UN Human Declaration of Human Rights. It has been known for over a millennia, the Greeks, the Romans, even the Indians used to have this concept of secrecy of the ballot. So when you remove all identifying information from a vote, this is an interesting thought experiment. Can you track the vote? Can you protect the vote? You can do that in a physical setting. Like when you slide your ballot into a physical ballot box, when you slide the paper in, you effectively anonymize it. And then you keep an eye, you put a camera, you train a camera on the ballot box and you make sure no one tampers with it. But you can't do that with a machine because a machine is technically a black box. Things go in, things come out. You don't know what is happening inside the machine. You don't. This is the reason that Germany, Netherlands, so many other countries, Ireland, they phased out, they terminated their electronic voting deployments and other countries like Finland, the UK, France, etc. They just chose not to jump into this. They chose not to open this Pandora's box. And this, I believe, it is easy, once you put the argument like this in front of people, it is easy to convince them to get them what is happening. And then you can build on it. You can say that because you have this black box, the system is actually more vulnerable to fraud than a paper-based system. Because in a black box, you can write computer code that can manipulate votes without being detected that has been done. These attacks have been demonstrated in the US. Likewise, you can have retail fraud like in paper-based elections. It takes a bit of effort to manipulate one vote. To manipulate 1,000 votes or 10,000 votes, you have to do a lot of physical effort. You have to set up a, you have to capture a polling station, you have to capture a ballot box, you have to spend all night, you have to have a coffee machine running, you have to spend all night manipulating the ballots. And these things can be discovered. But to manipulate 1,000 votes in an electronic voting machine, you just have to press the single button. There have been attacks which have shown that all you have to do is you just slide in, you just walk up to a voting machine, you slide in a USB, in one minute you take it out, the votes have been manipulated. That's it. So this is called retail fraud like wholesale fraud in bulk. Just one step, thousands of votes manipulated. Likewise, you often go up to ATMs and you might discover the ATM is out of business, right? It might be down, the link might be down, you walk up to another ATM, you use that. In a sense, you might log on to your internet banking portal, the portal might be down, you log on 20 minutes later, the portal is up. But with elections, you don't have that luxury. The machines have to work on election day and they have to be available. If they go down, that immediately casts a whole cloud of suspicion on the elections. Likewise, there are incidents and how you recover from incidents, like for instance, if my banking account gets hacked, there is a whole audit trail, investigators can follow up and they might be able to recover my funds. I can even protect myself. I can get insurance against banking fraud, right? But there is no such equivalent for elections. I can't get insurance against fraudulent election. And in many cases, the attackers, people who hack elections, the goal might not be to manipulate votes. It might just be to cast suspicion on results like if we knock off a results transmission system or if we knock off the online voting website for four hours, we can cast genuine suspicion on the elections. That is in a sense an election. It's not only that the election must be fair. It must be seen to be fair. And if it is not seen to be fair, it is technically a failed election. So this is very important. And likewise then, banks elections when you hold them so they are national infrastructure level projects they attract a whole different class of attacker, elite intelligence agencies. So now you're in the domain of cyber warfare. Banks are not subject to cyber warfare, online banking, they're not. But elections are and you might be aware that in 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, they officially designated their election systems as critical infrastructure in the same class as dams or power grids in the sense that if you attack election systems, that might be declared an act of war. It might be considered an act of war. And likewise, these attackers have resources that we cannot even imagine. Unlimited resources. For instance, one capability they have is something called zero-day attacks. What these agencies do, they look at popular software and they document certain flaws, they find certain flaws but they don't announce them publicly. They just hoard them. And then when they have enough, they put together an attack using those flaws and they launch that attack. And the effect is devastating because technically the person who is attacked, the party that is attacked has zero days to recover from the flaw because they have no idea this flaw even existed. So when the Iranian nuclear reactors were attacked, that attack had four zero-day flaws in windows. It was unprecedented. And it set the nuclear program back and in 2015, researchers demonstrated zero-day attacks on New South Wales iVote voting system. So this is, we have the proof of concept, these attacks are very real. So if this line of, if this argument is followed, you do manage to have common ground with you make some progress on overcoming the cognitive dissonance that exists between the technology community and the general stakeholders, the politicians, the media, the general public, the watchdog bodies, civil society. So this is something that I've had a lot of luck with and I'm going to conclude now because I think I'm out of time. So the conclusion here is this is a very positive thing which I've discovered only in the last year as well that when you try to generally connect with the stakeholders, when you meet them on their own terms, when you engage with them with their dialogue, that itself, that leads to visible results, visible progress and apparently the literature suggests, the research suggests that this actually is also good, it leads to more fruitful outcomes using election technology as well. So this is the, again, this is a very nice paper, one of my favorite papers from this domain, digital dilemmas. It's a study of election technology deployments in African countries and they looked at what failed and what worked and a lot of things failed and they found that unsurprisingly, the greatest gains from digitization come from countries where the quality of democracy is higher and the election commission is more independent because when people, when the stakeholders when they genuinely understand technology and they have the means to discuss it and debate it, then they come up with solutions which make more sense, which are more transparent and they also take ownership of those solutions. So what happens also as well is that in the event of a mishap, there is less finger pointing and there is more movement towards the solution. So we don't, people who are working in this domain, people like myself, we don't just have to push forward the right technology. We should try to inculcate a democratic culture, we should go about it in a democratic manner, which means that we should sit down with the stakeholders, we should look them in the eye, we should respect their integrity as individuals and we should engage with them honestly. We should try to change their minds, but we should be open to the possibility of our own minds being changed as well. And so this is what I have to say and this is what I'm going to be trying at our, what I have been trying for a while now and what I'll be trying at our meeting. So I hope you enjoyed this talk and I'm sorry I'm not here to answer questions and thank you for your time and I'll hopefully see you again soon. Thank you.