 Thank you Mansi, thank you Shankar san for having me over on this very important topic. I would actually like to start out with a few stories and why these stories they're not related to emotive or blockchains at all but they give you a perspective of what kind of problems are there in the Indian democratic setup, what are the kind of problems that elections face when you actually go on the ground and campaigning. So I will not name the states, I will not name the political parties but these stories are essentially there to make you understand what are the challenges and then we'll go on to evaluate how technology fits into the framework. So in one of the constituencies, one candidate essentially gave 5000 rupees to 50% of the voters registered in that parliamentary constituency. It's an absurdly huge amount in about 10 times higher than the next candidate on the list. That candidate won the election. In another part of India altogether, politicians realize that even when they pay someone it's not necessary that they would vote for you when they're inside the voting booth. They could take money from you, they could take money from the other side and then vote according to their wishes because we have a process called secret ballot where no one really knows who voted for who. Your ballot is secretly cast inside the voting booth. What people did and what the political party did in this particular region of the country is that they realized, okay, these people in these specific communities are not going to vote for me. So I am actually going to pay them to not go vote at all because once they're there, I don't know who they voted for but because the election commission marks your finger, it's very easy to tell who voted and who didn't. So people who paid to just sit at home and not vote at all. Another really interesting incident is while actually surveying people in a constituency, we met a lot of people who talked about a party affiliated with their caste group and their religious group and people were very certain that okay, we don't care what really happens on the development front. We really don't care about the infrastructure. We feel empowered when this party comes to power. Our community feels empowered. In a democracy, is that empowerment at the cost of say, development a good thing or is it a bad thing? Is the person exercising his free right to choose whoever he wants in a democratic setup or is voting on religion and caste just because he feels a sense of pride just because he feels that okay, this party is my caste group and he decides to support them. Another very interesting thing that came up during surveys a lot is that a lot of people base their entire opinion on who they would vote for on entirely incorrect information. Like the facts were entirely wrong. People would believe that okay, this state's GDP has like crossed the national average even though it was the worst state in the country before. These kind of informations mostly reach people through the political borders now it reaches through social media and what's happened these different sources. And there's a really famous saying stating the essence of a democracy survives with a well-informed electorate. If the electorate is misinformed, if they base their decision to vote on facts that are just not true, then is it still a democracy? One very scary thing that has come up multiple times is that videos have come out from different elections and this happens specially during local body elections where there is one person inside the polling booth and he presses the button for other people. So old people go to vote. They're standing in line waiting for their turn. Their turn comes before they're about to vote. Someone else presses the button on their behalf for obviously his political party and the side that he supports. So these kind of elements have entered polling booths. If you looked at the history of India, boot capturing was a very common thing where a political party using just brute force took over an entire polling booth, stamped all of the ballot papers or just pressed all of the buttons on the EVM continuously. Ballot paper was much faster because you could stamp a lot of ballot papers and shove it into a box. EVM is slightly slower because it's rate limited. After every vote, there is a certain amount of delay and another button needs to be clicked for the machine to get reactivated. So it's slower, but these kind of things still happen in a lot of parts of the country. So these stories are essentially to tell you what challenges we face. Now what has happened is that two major things have transformed in democracies all over the world and their challenges that everyone is trying to figure out how to deal with. No one has a good response. One challenge is essentially social media and the interconnectedness of the world where everyone can present their own facts. So while we were writing the second book, The Out of Conjuring Alternate Realities, we realized there is no such thing as an objective reality anymore because your reality is based on the information that you consume, the information environment that you live in. In this kind of a climate, if I control all of the information that you see, because I know how to target you better on social media, I know how to target you over WhatsApp, I know how to target the people around you and I can shape their information. They will start to believe it once they continuously get information that reinforces a certain narrative or reinforces certain facts and figures. Even the data that people have is not factual anymore. Every side has its own data. So this transformation has happened essentially because of the penetration of the internet to even the remotest parts of the country. A lot of people believe that smartphones impact just a very small percentage of the population because very few people have smartphones. But a very interesting fact about this is when we went to villages to do electoral surveys, we realized that the arguments on WhatsApp reached much beyond people with smartphones because whoever has a smartphone saw those arguments and then used them while discussing politics with others within their village. So they used those arguments at the local Saikha Dukam. They used the same arguments while working with other people or just sitting under a tree in the evening. So the WhatsApp arguments reach other people already. This is a major transformation. The second major transformation that has happened in Indian politics now, it started in US politics about 30 years ago, is just the amount of data that political parties have and the way that they use data. In essence, a political party is trying to figure out how your vote can be converted to their people. What do you require for this? In the US, they started out with analyzing people's likes, analyzing people's thoughts on different issues. If you support gun rights, who are you likely to vote for? If you support liberal values, who are you likely to vote for? Even if you support something very obscure like a specific football team, who are you likely to vote for and how that football team can be used for messaging to convert your vote? So they did some of these obscure experiments. The scary part about India though is that it is a lot easier to do because caste and religion in general works very well out here. So you don't even need to know the person's individual preferences. You don't need to know what issues they care about per se. You need to only figure out what the caste group as a whole cares about, what can be used to convert their vote, what the religious group cares about and what can be done to convert their vote. And then you need to develop a mechanism to get the message out to them. How does this mechanism get developed? That essentially happens because the electoral rules are public records. So whoever is eligible to vote, their names are on the election commission website right now. This data gets converted into Excel sheets. From there, it gets linked to different data sets which have your phone number, which because we don't have a great data protection law right now, phone numbers are not even sensitive data under, say, the IT act or any other legislation. So selling them and buying them is not illegal at all. A lot of you might have gotten a lot of messages from companies that you've never interacted with or even maybe your local MLA or MP has called you through an auto dialer before election and said, please vote for me. How did they get your number? How did they know that you live in their constituency? It's essentially because your phone data was mapped to your electoral data. This forms the basis of how targeted messaging happens. But here is the very interesting component. This is not it. It's your caste and religion gets analyzed. Your voter role gets linked to phone number, but then any other data set that is available. This includes, say, how rich or poor you are. How would a politician know this? Right now, one of the best proxies for urban areas is something like the electricity bill. And a lot of the discounts actually have websites where you just need to enter a bill number to get the electricity bill out. That is how poor the data security here is. So essentially, you can just write a script to go from, say, the number 1000 to 9999. And it is going to literally download all the bills running a very simple script. And this is true of even Delhi surprisingly. We tried the North Delhi Discom website and it's still the same. I actually collected this data one and a half years ago. I looked at it right now to see if it's still the same. All you need even right now is just your bill numbered. And you can figure out what your neighbor's electricity bills are. Why is the electricity bill so important? One, they give you an exact address. They give you a phone number. They give you a name. So these things get correlated to the voter rule by reason. But they also tell us, okay, this person is rich because he probably has air conditioning. He has more lighting. He has more routes. That's why he has a higher bill. If you have a lower bill, if you have something like, say, the free electricity, if you follow the free electricity bill criteria of the Delhi government, then it can be said reasonably that, okay, you don't have too many appliances at home. You're probably not running, say, a heater and a cooler and a fridge 24-7. So these things become very important because then specific messages tailored to that socioeconomic group can be sent by specific political parties to just that group. And this matters a lot in elections. Even if you have the best message in the world, if you don't have the mechanism to deliver that message, your entire great message and your entire great idea is essentially useless when it comes to the democratic process. So, okay, we've covered some stories on how elections get manipulated and we've covered what kind of data political parties use, but how does it connect to something like, say, voting and blockchains? I'll start with one research that we did while writing the book and that is essentially we looked at what cyber criminals did to get OTPs out of the field. So you know the one-time password that you get for bank transactions and for sending money from one place to the other or essentially any online transaction that you do these days. You require a message that comes to your phone number. And people intuitively understand that, okay, this number is supposed to be secret. This number is, I'm not supposed to give it to anyone else, but a lot of things in India fell into place at the same time where cyber scammers realized they could create excellent scripts to get this number from people. So a lot of the first cyber scams that started forgetting people's OTP essentially started with people calling others and they bought these data sets. So they already knew where your bank account is, they knew your bank number, they knew your name. So they called very authoritatively, okay, is this speaking? I am calling from this branch and you haven't linked your Aadhaar to your bank account. And if you don't do it right now, your account is going to get blocked. When this kind of a thing happens to someone who really requires their account to draw their monthly wages, who have like 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 in their account, that person is going to give whatever OTP has very fast because his experience of working with the governmental system and especially PSU banks is so bad that he would be very scared of an account getting blocked. So cyber criminals use this and as soon as they got the OTP, they transferred all of the money out from that account using say payment wallets. This also affected a lot of very wealthy people. The script was different. They were promised some great prize and to share their OTP if they wanted to receive it and a lot of people fell for it. So this is the level of digital security consciousness that we have in this nation and this is honestly the level of security consciousness that the entire world has right now because all of these things are new and one big problem that we had was OTP was supposed to be for bank transactions but now everybody wants an OTP. You go to someone's building and they have like a building registration system which sends an OTP. You go to a lot of these tea and coffee shops and they send an OTP. You basically want to like eat at certain restaurants. They have a loyalty program that sends you an OTP. So we have normalized the sharing of OTPs constantly even though it's supposed to be something sensitive and secret. This connects to voting in the sense of if money can be stolen from people's bank accounts by themselves, them revealing their OTPs, then it's very likely that a vote will get stolen too. This can be something that is a major pitfall when we think about a process like voting. Though why do we care about say blockchains and voting at all? What is the problem that we are trying to fix here? The things that we talked about, cash getting distributed for votes, religion getting used, cars getting used, people capturing entire votes by physically going there, what kind of a problem does e-voting solve? What kind of a problem does blockchain solve? I realized that there are three things that any technology and elections can do. Going from say the least effective and the one that we should care about the least to the most, the first thing that technology can do is make elections faster. So the voting happens more efficiently. Lines get inside voting booths faster and they exit voting booths faster. The results come out faster. Why do I say this is something that we should care less about? Essentially because it is our democratic duty to essentially vote for our representatives who are going to represent the country for the next five years. I don't think it's too much often ask for someone to stand in line for one hour extra, even two hours extra or for the results to take five days or 10 days or 20 days. How does it matter if an election result comes out in two days versus 20 days when the people who are voted into power are essentially going to be controlling things for the next five years. So I don't see it as a major challenge, but it is something that technology can potentially improve. The next one is making elections cheaper. So in what sense do I mean cheaper? For political parties, there probably isn't much that technology can do to make elections cheaper, especially because the introduction of a new medium like social media does not cut down on other election expenses. Initially when this entire phenomenon of Facebook and WhatsApp started in 2012-13, I actually believe that okay, this is going to reduce electoral costs because parties now have an easier way to reach their audiences. But what happened was they had to advertise here, they had to build huge content farms and teams and units that would create WhatsApp groups here plus they had to continue to do all of the activities on the ground that they were doing. Rallys have not stopped. Filling buses with people to get them at the rally when you have not stopped. Hortings and posters and pamphlets have not stopped. Autos and video vans have not stopped. All of it is there. Social media has just added onto it and it is an external extra cost. TV advertising still happens. Newspaper advertising still happens. So elections have essentially become more expensive because of electoral technology. If you look at something like 3D hologram or new campaign technologies, then it has only added two costs. But how can technology make elections cheaper? Essentially it can do it through the election commission. If it reduces the cost of overseeing an election, if it requires less vehicles, less people, then that might be beneficial in some ways. But also not a very important consideration considering elections in a state happen every five years. At the national level, happen five years, we should be spending some amount of money on democracy. Just to ensure that an election functions properly. If we need to deploy some more resources into the election commission, even in the sense of people monitoring, say, fake news on social media, hate speech on social media, then we should, as a democracy, be deciding that, okay, this is where we want to place resources. Maybe we will give less newspaper ads on how successful a government is, and we would spend some more money here. So resource itself is not a very big problem when it comes to the election commission, and even when it is, resources when the government are completely available, technology to reduce costs, and if it harms any other component, it's not really worth it. So what is the thing that technology should be doing in elections? In essence, I believe there is only one thing which is making elections fairer and more democratic. How can technology make elections fairer and more democratic? One such thing, say, as Sankarshan mentioned early on, facial recognition and biometrics for voters, it could potentially, like people could say that, okay, a lot of fake voters vote on the behalf of others using their identity. So if you have something like facial recognition, or you have something like biometrics, then that might prevent it. The problem here, though, and our experience looking at Aadhar-enabled PDS distribution was that a lot of the times, the machine just fails. You try to authenticate someone's fingerprint, and it just doesn't work at that point of time. If this happens in an election, if the person is not able to vote, they're sent back home. You have essentially taken away someone's democratic right. You have taken away the right that they have as a citizen of India. The most basic kind of right that they have here is the right to vote. And you've taken that away because, okay, your machine didn't take their fingerprint in, or your machine did not recognize their biometrics and the facial recognition system did work at that point of time. This could be a potential challenge one. Second thing, problem that I see with this is that it is also very susceptible. In a country like India, it's entirely possible that these systems exist, but there are also bypasses that exist. A lot of the times, you must have seen this on social media that a lot of people got an OTP for someone else's vaccination, and then the vaccination happened to and the certificate got generated without you ever sharing your OTP. So this has happened to so many people that there is obviously some sort of a back door built into say the vaccination system where the OTP registration can be bypassed. And the vaccination certificate can be issued regardless of the person sharing their data with you or not. So these kind of challenges, if they happen in a democracy, they reduce faith in the democratic system a lot. And once that starts happening, it's a risk for the entire nation's setup. And the basis of the country gets damaged if the faith and trust is damaged. So technology, when it's brought in, we must recognize that it should work perfectly before it comes here. It cannot operate like a startup where we are going to experiment with it. We are going to try it. The second thing with something like e-voting, if it is something like what's happening right now where you need to go to a voting booth and press a button, except it's electronically connected, that is just adding an additional risk factor because things get hacked. Connected systems are easier to break into. If everything is a standalone machine, if every EVM is a machine on its own, if someone wanted to hack it, they would have to go to every EVM. They would have to go to lakhs and lakhs and thousands of booths. One empty constituency has like 2,500-3,000 booths. MLA constituency has 500-600 booths. So to reach that many booths and hack that many EVMs is a very difficult thing to organize logistically. But say if this was on the Internet and if people could access that network and they could hack into the system, then essentially an election could get stolen. But if you have e-voting where the person doesn't even need to go there, if it's say blockchain based, but they can do it on their own phone or they can do it from different terminals, what comes in here is that people's secret ballot is essentially taken away. What is going to happen is that politicians are going to build their own booths where they're going to be standing outside, paying you money and looking at, okay, are you voting for me or not? And this was the argument against postal ballots. So personally, like looking at the USR study there, anyone can request a postal ballot. You get it to wherever you are at that point of time and you can vote in your home state too. So you essentially vote for whoever you want to, you fold it up in an envelope and you post it. And they count it as a normal vote. In India, postal ballot is essentially only like defense services and people who are working in elections who can't go and vote during that time. Why was this not extended to citizens? I wanted to understand this so I talked to a lot of people. And I realized essentially these ballot papers will get bought. You request a postal ballot, it comes to you. Political parties will go out to major constituencies and they will just say, okay, I'm going to give you the money, you give me your ballot. I will fill it up for you. I will send it in. You just sell it to me. So this kind of a threat gets created in the ballot setup, which can also exist in e-voting if the person is doing the voting outside the confines of a polling booth managed by the Election Commission. Another thing that technology has created now is that it's easier to recognize who votes for you and who doesn't. We have booth-wise voting data available in something called the Form 20 and a booth is 800 to 1,000 people. So we know right now how these 1,000 people voted across every booth. So when political parties look at data like that, they know this booth, 80% of the people they vote from. Out of these 1,000 people, 800 people vote from. Who are these people? It's very easy to identify because then you look at the voter role, you see what community they are from, what caste they are from, what religion they are from. You start understanding, okay, these are the groups that are against me. Now the challenge comes in that these groups can very easily be disenfranchised. In one state, they actually deleted names of particular people that they realized weren't, probably not going to vote for them from the electoral group. They did a revision and they updated it, which the Election Commission is supposed to do anyways. But they did it in such a manner that a specific set of people just lost their right to vote because they no longer had their name on the voting booth. They found out when they went to the polling booth on the election day, they handed over their voter ID and they were told, okay, your name is not there, even though the person had been voting at the same booth for like the last 15 years, the last 20 years. So these kind of challenges come in when you have this kind of data combined with power over democratic institutions. So how does voting help this? How does blockchain help this? How does it create a fairer election and a more democratic election is the only consideration that we should have. Faster elections should not matter, cheaper elections should not matter. In my personal experience, I have not found a great use case where voting and blockchain would help elections. On the other hand, it creates a lot of risks and vulnerability. So just because of this and because the current system is working reasonably well in the voting process, we have a lot of challenges in this democracy, but they don't come from the voting process itself. From what I have seen, it comes from the way elections are conducted. So we start to address that is how we make a better democracy and technology seems like a panacea for a lot of things. We are like, okay, we are going to eliminate fraud, we are going to eliminate risk, but first you have to evaluate how much fraud there is, how much of anything is happening that is wrong that can be fixed with these technological solutions. Very interested in the rest of the speakers of this conference because I have also been trying to learn how blockchain and voting helps the electoral process. So happy to take questions now. Thank you. So one of the questions was how does the idea of the seated ballot get affected and I think towards the end of your talk you managed to answer that question. But I think while you were speaking, a couple of thoughts which came to my mind and while I wait for other people to share their questions on the chat, I'll just very quickly share a couple of my thoughts as well. So one was that I mean, I've also done some work with politicians and I think a lot of politicians take pride in the fact that they know their constituency very well. They know their constituency, the makeup of the constituency, the communities which are living there like the back of their hand. And earlier I think this understanding would be developed by actually spending time in the constituency being on the ground among the people. But nowadays you can develop all this understanding from the data itself and as you have mentioned all the data that you can gather from all these many sources. So I think it's just the very understanding of a grounded politician who knows the constituency very well has been turned around on its head. And now it's a politician who can remotely know all the data about their constituency and still not know what's happening in their constituency. So that was one thought that sort of like came to my mind. And the other was with respect to trust. So at the end when you say that people are still coming out and voting, so they obviously trust the electoral process even though they might have a lot of distrust of the politicians of political parties. But I think given the fact that despite everything that you mentioned about EVMs and all that is still you know conversations which happen after every election EVMs have been hacked and and all of the conversation led to VVPACs coming in and everything. Do you think the usage of technology which as a humidity that it could be had it could create you know perhaps even more distrust among the voters with respect to the voting process. So if you could you know address that one question and then the other question from from Mr. Bharun Mitra is yeah exactly I mean some something similar about how voting on EVM can be manipulated at the boot level. So yeah so if you could answer those two questions. So just commenting on the first part completely agreed a lot of the politicians who were very grounded understood their constituencies because they spent a lot of time there. That has transformed but there are two reasons for it one part is okay they can do it remotely. The other component to it is actually that a lot of the candidates don't matter anymore. A lot of the elections that get contested get contested at say the state level and the national level and the national level leader and the state level leader has become more dominant in recent years. One third part also is that constituencies are much larger now than they were say 30 years ago. So reasonably you could expect a politician to see like one lakh people in his looks of our constituencies at the constituencies size of 5 to 6 lakh people just in your constituency it's almost impossible to get to know people and a lot of politicians who really try but aren't able to make it to even 10 percent of their constituency in their five year term. Coming to EVMs there are two parts again the first part is I have never seen any evidence that's conclusively shown that EVMs are being rigged or are being hacked. I don't personally believe in the theory only because they're unconnected devices. Every individual EVM can be susceptible to hacking but to do it at mass scale you would require people going to the EVMs physically and doing it and I as someone who's worked in politics for the last five six years I have like ran teams who conducted surveys over like 250 300 people. I don't know if I can find even like 20 people to go to boots and do something like this without them coming out and claiming credit for it. We would have thousands of people right now in the country claiming oh I am the EVM that's why this politician won if this was being done at scale. So I don't believe it is. Is it possible to hack one single EVM? Yes it is. I actually had a computer security professor from the University of Michigan who did hack into the EVMs. He can't enter it anymore but there is a very interesting paper on it on how he did it. So individual machines are susceptible but at scale it's not happening. Though the argument for why EVMs exist and why can't we use ballot papers are also not great ones. Essentially it's only about time. It's that okay counting ballot papers takes too much time. How does it matter if election results come in two days versus 20 days is something that I haven't understood yet considering the person is getting elected to run the country for the next five years. I think we can spend 20 days extra waiting. Okay there is also a question that somebody has shared on the live stream. This is how can blockchain be used in election? There are a lot of ways to do it. Why we would do it with blockchains there isn't a great answer but technically every individual voter could be on the blockchain so that whenever anyone is deleted and added somewhere else like you can verify that okay this individual identity existed there. It was cancelled from there and it's been placed somewhere else. So what this does is it prevents someone from having their names in two or three different voter roles because a lot of people have it in their villages plus they have it in the city that they're living at now and it's very difficult to eliminate these names at multiple places. If it's on a blockchain with every individual voter having like one identity it'll be very obvious okay your name went from here to here to here and it will be a perpetual record. It does create some privacy concerns because then people know exactly when and where you moved across your entire life on a perpetual ledger so your life and movement can be cracked but yes that is one use case. Another use case of blockchains could potentially be something like just the tallying of results. So write our issue physical certificates if you put it on a blockchain then it's immutable no one can change the record and things like that once it's entered by the official it's permanently there. There's no question of anyone changing anything but returning officers when they sign the certificate for a candidate getting elected representatives of all the candidates are there in the counting process. So if and if this was a problem if it some fraud was happening at scale there would be huge hue and cry right now which isn't there which leads me to believe it's not too much of a problem. Another okay couple of questions have come in. Another question is is there a tech solution to increasing voter turnout? So yes sir there is but it comes with risks. As I said the US had such great voting during COVID also because they allowed for postal ballots for everyone. Anyone could request it they got a paper at their home. In India it is slightly riskier because those pieces of paper will get sold I am 100% sure of it. When votes get sold then like why would ballots not get bought by political party. We would literally see like boots and kiosks like literal shops where they are like okay you can sell your ballot here that's going to happen. So that model of turn increase in voter turnout probably not a great thing. What could potentially be done for voter turnout increase is using technology to make registration material. It should be very easy for someone to register themselves to vote at a particular vote. If I move from here to another place I literally have to find an officer and request him sir please insert my name here. That process they put it online but even they don't like this idea. If someone wants to vote in one particular place because these change residences it should be much easier. Second part that I see for voter turnout increase is obviously like information campaigns about why voting is important for your democratic rights but that is something that the educational system should handle instead of say the election commission. Right and I think this will be the last question for this talk today which is that does a government in power have any advantages because of the use of tech. Things like control over the machine or its maintenance or getting into contracts for the machines or the software or is it the election commission which is completely in charge of you know hand of contracts for EVMs etc or is the government in any way involved there. So the government in power has a huge tech advantage when it comes to data collection like a lot of the governmental scheme data is a lot of the lists that get compiled for governmental schemes are essentially also used for politics. So if there is a party in power they obviously have access to it while the party who is not in power they likely like don't have access to it even when they do they have like partial lists here and there they never have the entire database. If you look at what has happened in say Telangana then they're trying to create the profile of every household in the state that maps the household's income and cost and this and that so it's essentially the government collecting all of the data that the political party could ever dream of. So this kind of a thing this access yes when it comes to the machine itself there isn't an advantage to being in power versus not being in power what you do have is more control over the people who manage elections. So in general my belief is that still the most vulnerable component of an election is the people. So how does a booth get captured it gets captured with the consent of people who are designated to protect it. It doesn't happen that like someone's just taken it over it because they have like a technological advantage it's that they had control over these people. So that component needs to be addressed yes technology could potentially have a role there where like every booth could be live streamed and anyone could see any booth that would make things easier for say political parties to keep going what's happening at every booth are the lines functioning faster slowly very interestingly one thing that happens during elections are political parties know which booths are not favorable to them so they do a lot of things to slow down voting and they slow it down so that some people will get frustrated not some people won't be able to vote because it's not too late so less votes will get cast at those places while you try to speed up voting at the booths that are favorable for you. So things like this getting live streamed could help.