 Good afternoon and greetings appropriate for the time of the day where you are joining us from. It is 4pm in India and 19th of June today we have a webinar as part of the project which examines the proposal to introduce blockchain technology in Indian elections. This election tech project was initiated to form a focus on how technology could work for people in society. And as part of it we intend to undertake public deliberations and studies in order to have a lively discussion around the topic. As well as to be able to arrive at an idea that a change such as this, which is a significant large one since the introduction of the EVMVPAD system should not necessarily have uncritical acceptance. This election tech project is hosted by Karana, which is a collection of independent critiques of various aspects of digital India. My name is Shankar Shun and I'm the curator and promoter of this project. The project of Karana is hosted and supported by Hasgig.com, which is a platform for collaborations across practices surrounding technology, design, law, policy systems, data, and among other topics. The collaborations take place via user generated content, which are shared by practitioners leading to discovery and elevation of ideas and individuals. Hasgig.com and Hasgig Media provide the underlying infrastructure tools and services to facilitate these conversations. One of the reasons that we are having these conversations as masterclasses, because we want to enable participants to acquire some foundational knowledge and perspectives, which we believe would be required to evaluate the intended and unintended processes of technology that are introduced for large public space interventions. And we want to bring in a diverse set of perspectives, which focus on identity, equity, privacy, security rights, agency, and the socio-economic impact of such proposals. I'm incredibly happy to have this session today because we have a speaker and our moderators who have been extensively focusing on the intersections of trust, elections, technology, and all that flows from those intersections. We have as a moderator today, Ann Ozea, who's a researcher at the National University of Sciences and Technology at Islamabad. Her research interests span election security, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. She has broad experiences as a technologist in developing and building prototypes for end to end verifiable voting systems. And we will also have Hina who's a researcher doing doctoral dissertation at the National University of Sciences and Technology. Her research interests are primarily election security, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. Hina has been part of the Internet voting task force, which was formed in 2018 to undertake a technical audit of a system called iVote, which is an Internet voting platform to enable overseas Pakistanis to vote. Hina is a member of the Election Technology Forum, formed by the Free and Fair Election Network, a think tank that provides parliamentary governance, political and elections oversight from the Council of Pakistan. Recently, Hina has received funding on under the research for social transformation and advancement program by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics pertaining to the challenges of adopting e2, verifiable voting into the various context of the developing democracy like Pakistan, and is working alongside Hina on the same ground. At this moment, before I hand it over to him, a few housekeeping notes. We have changed our format of webinar a bit. So, if you are joining us from, this is being streamed on YouTube, and if you are joining us on YouTube, you can post the questions on the YouTube chat and then we relate to our Zoom session. So, if you are attending and participating via the Zoom, you can use the Q&A to raise questions for the panelists. If you would like to speak, you could use, you could indicate that you would like to speak and one of the panelists will enable you to have the mic. And once you are at us, once you're completed with the conversation, we will be sort of removing the functionality again. And we'll hand it over to him to take it from here. All in. Thank you Shankar Sen for such a kind words. And thank you for providing me such an opportunity to be a part of this forum. It's going to be a whole new experience for me. So, without delaying, I would like to take few minutes to introduce our today's speaker. Ninjala Naibola. Ninjala Naibola is a writer, political analyst and activist based in Kenya. Her work focuses on intersection between technology, media and as well as in society. Naibola writes extensively about African society and politics, technology, international law, as well as about the feminism for the academic and non-academic publications. Also, she holds the BA in African Studies and political science from the University of Birmingham. And also she did MSc in African Studies, as well as in force migration. She did both from the University of Oxford, as well as a JD from Howard Law School. So, she has held several research associate positions, including with the Center for International Governance Innovation, the Oversea Development Institute, and as well as the Oxford Internet Institute and other institutions. So, also she also working as a research lead for several projects on human rights, broadly, and digital rights specifically around the world. So, not only this, she also writes, writes commentary for publications like the Nation, Al Jazeera, the Boston Review and others. She is the author of Digital Democracy, Analog Politics, how the internet areas transforming politics in Kenya, which is described as a mass street for all researcher as well as for the all journalist, writing about Kenya today. She is also the author of Traveling While Black, as is inspired by Life on the Move. Nibola sits on the board of Amnesty International Kenya. So, we welcome you, Nanjala, to be here with us. We are extremely honored to have you as our today's speaker. So, I would like Nanjala to please take over and share her insights on today's topics. Thank you. Over to you, Nanjala. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning wherever you are. It's one o'clock here in Nairobi. I'm going to speak very briefly about the intersection ideas between information and tech and elections because I think this is a key branch of the broader project that you're all undertaking in terms of understanding how technology is going to impact our elections. I want to begin and I want to preface this conversation by saying that I'm not a techie. I'm definitely not a person who builds technology or anything like that. I'm a political scientist and my focus in my work is always trying to understand how people use technology, how technology changes, how people view their society and how people view the possibilities, I guess, that are available to them in political possibilities, especially in terms of technology. I do this because I think for a long time there was always a perception that more technology would always make things better, that if we use more technology in our political and social systems, that it would make us more efficient, that it would make us more transparent, that it would make us more inclusive. But more and more we're finding the data that's saying that actually it's a little bit more ambiguous than that, that there actually are key elements in the deployment of technology in political and social systems that get lost in the conversation when we focus just on the technical aspects of the technology, how will people, how will the trust be affected, how will transparency be affected, how will belief in institutions be affected, how will people relate to their community, how may people relate to the people who belong to their broader social groups. All of these things are affected by the deployment of technology and elections specifically but in political society more broadly. And those are some of the things that I'm going to be talking about today. And it's actually interesting that we're having this conversation today because just this morning, or starting from yesterday into this morning, a number of us in Kenya woke up to a rude shock. We had been registered under the Office of the Registration of Political Parties, which is a statutory body. So it's the government body that manages people's political party registrations and also the political parties, which ones are allowed to run for office, which ones are legal and things like that. And this morning, or again starting from yesterday, when you look up on the portal that or our PP portal with your ID card, a number of us found that we had been registered for political parties that we hadn't registered for that actually were being counted as members of political parties that we haven't registered for. And part of what we're still kind of trying to reverse engineer how this can happen but one of the things that's really interesting to me is that the system is linked to your ID card. Now an ID card in Kenya has a very long and complex history, political history. It's tied to the colonial process of first ID cards issued in 1915. And the ID card in Kenya is explicitly linked to your ethnic identity that because we can only register for ID cards using our father's details so you can't use your mother's details and your father's details have to go with his father's details blah blah blah, that takes us back to the colonial idea of reserves and the colonial idea of ethnic homelands of where people were being basically sorted into specific geographical regions and told this is where you belong. So what I suspect is happening and again we're still reverse engineering it is that people were being sorted because for many people the party that you're being allocated corresponds with the party that is dominant in a specific region that belongs or is in theory an ethnic homeland. So if you are Kikuyu then you're getting sorted to the Jubilee party which is predominant Kikuyu if you are Luya you're being sorted into the ANC which is predominant Luya. If the details on your card reflect your ethnic identity then you're getting sorted to a political party that belongs that ethnic identity. This is more than an administrative era. This is actually a very serious case of ethnic profiling, and it's a very serious case of data privacy, data breaching data privacy data protection. It's a very serious case of misuse of identity information. And it's happened in the past. It happened in the 2017 election as well and I captured some of those details and digital democracy analog politics because elections are a focal point for understanding some of the energies that exist in the broader society, namely that there is a political interest and the political class to have people categorized by ethnic identities because it makes it easier to mobilize around other election issues. So if you can say that I have, you know, 2 million people registered to vote in my political party, 2 million people registered in my political party. Not only do you get more money from the government because we have allocations for political parties but also it gives you leverage to negotiate and to try and influence the national electoral system. So, and, you know, ethnic identities again as I outlined in the book have been focal point for many of the, almost all of the political violence that we've seen in Kenya that during the worst cycle of violence in 2007. It was the ID card that people were using to identify this person belongs to this ethnic group, they can be allowed to pass through this person does not belong to that ethnic group, and many people were killed because of the information that was collected on their ID card. So I'm giving you this example to show you that sometimes the things are bigger than. Sometimes the risks, the opportunities, the dangers are bigger just the information that is that just the technical system that Kenya has invested a great deal in its technical system and how it has deployed technology. Without addressing the underlying socio political concerns without addressing what it is that made people fight in 2007 what is it that made people fight in 2017. What is it that makes elections such contentious issues in the country. And so the argument that I always make whenever I'm speaking about tech and politics is this, you cannot understand the role that technology is going to play in a political system, until you understand that particular society, that the intersections always replicate whatever lay before that if you don't address the underlying fractures from before, you're only going to intensify them if it's exclusion you're only going to intensify it if it's a misogyny you're only going to intensify tech is an intensifier. It's not a panacea that's going to fix all of the issues. I want to focus today specifically on one aspect and you know there are many aspects that are possible but I'm going to focus on the information and the role of information in electrical systems and political systems. Because again as I said I'm interested in the society and the politics not necessarily just the technical aspects and you. I was just talking about blockchain and elections and, you know, we are in a weird system in a weird process place right now in Kenya where we are trying to deploy blockchain and artificial intelligence and multiple socio political friends, and we have, you know, some of the more simple technology that was used in the electric electronic voting registration, biometric details and all of that so not going to be specifically speaking about blockchain but I think some of the patterns that I'm going to point out that happened with us with all of the other systems are things that you should be aware of and things that you should be thinking about as you start to imagine well, what will the role of blockchain and technology and AI being elections in the future. So, I'm fiddling with my computer because my computer was giving me a hard time before sorry. And it's still giving me a hard time. This is not great. Okay, well let's see how I do. So, the importance of information in the political system. I want you to start with the imagination that the public sphere. This is I use the framework that have a mass you can have a mass proposes that the public sphere is basically where we all gather to exchange ideas about how we want to be governed and how we want our ideas to be governed, sort of physical space, although in the past it did used to be a physical space. In India you have Dantamantar in London they have Hyde Park. You will have heard that there are places where people would gather to literally tell their politicians, politicians, we don't want this so we're leading a protest we're resisting this, but the public sphere has for a long time been an imagined space. It is comprised of the media it is comprised of a protest it is comprised of our ability to protest our ability to gather freedom of association, freedom of expression. It is membership in a sports club in, you know, religious institution it is wherever you go to express a political opinion, and to be engaged with other citizens in building this political conversation. We have governance in the process of governance is basically a conversation. It's a conversation between us the citizens and the people who governance, and it's a conversation that doesn't again just happen with words, but it is in our ability to express our preferences. That is really the kind of the dialogue the public dialogue that we're having. And so, again, protest is a great example of us saying to our government we don't like this thing that you're doing you need to do better. And the feedback that we get from the government is that they change their behavior, or they drill down and say actually we have we know what we're doing so they beat protesters and resist protesters and things like that. In this framework and election is a critical part of the public discourse and election is a critical part of how we determine. It's like a matte the mandate of the government that what we've given the government the mandate to do. We can reject it we can accept it we can reject certain aspects of it, and it becomes really the focal point for most of our democratic energies, especially in countries where the other feedback mechanisms are not as strong. So, if you are living in a society where, and I'll give Kenya as an example here. Trade unions have been circumvented. So you can't really express your opinions through a trade union that many of the religious institutions that would have played a key part have retreated from politics. And that's where, for example, in the United States you would have had religious leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King junior being at the forefront of the civil rights movement. In other countries you'll find that religious movements will have retreated from political spaces and only focus on the domestic sphere. If you don't have strong civic institutions if you don't have strong civil society, then really the election becomes the main place where you can actually be in conversation with your government. It's the main place where citizens have power to say we don't like this and we're rejecting this or we support this, keep doing what it is that you're doing. And this is a problem right it's a problem in some ways because we have distilled the entire process of democracy into an event that happens you know once every four years once every five years once every seven years. We're never supposed to be an ongoing conversation we're supposed to have all of these various outlets to be able to communicate, but if we're only doing it once every five years it means the stakes are really high. It means that elections become make or break for our societies and for our ways of life. This is exactly what's happened in Kenya, because of the retreat of the trade reunions and the treat of other civic space. Every five years the entire country comes to a standstill. Every five years it becomes everything. The stakes are so high that politicians really there was a study that found that the average politician who runs for president in Kenya spends $50,000, just on the election five million shillings just in the election year. That's not even counting how much that they're spending. What will these other aspects. So, with that distortion of information becomes around elections becomes included. And it's not just about, it's, sorry, it's probably about the information that we receive. So, do you know who is, do you know what their plans, do you know what they did in that information is also important but also the information that we generate. Our voter registration information, our PC information, our physical addresses and remember what I did example I gave in the beginning this is why this is, this is an issue because the size of a political party in Kenya, determine how much money you get from the government which funds all of your campaigns. We have a constitutional requirement that every body public body must not contain no more than two thirds of one gender and it assumes a gender binary but the data on women how many women are registered in the political party reflects whether the party is legally constituted like is it appearing to the constitutional gender two thirds requirement. So, information is power. Information gives the person who has it the ability to organize and reorganize and the ability to influence the public. One of the points that I want to, to emphasize from that one is that information matters because it allows the person to. It allows the person to control the narrative, the person who has it to control the narrative. It allows the person to have leverage to influence the inputs and outputs that go into the democratic process. It allows citizens to participate fully and actively in the political process. It allows them to, to contribute to the public distance the shaping of the public sphere. And so the political economy of information, the, who has it, who controls it, who is able to influence it is a key part of maintaining the elections. Very patient information with public and have a very broken. One key pillar of generating political information is the media free me, the ability to report lecture data, the ability to tell people this is what your president has been up to in the last year. One key pillar of the democratic process as a whole, but also the election specifically. So we have, I spend a lot of time a lot of people wonder why did I spend you know two or three chapters in digital democracy talking media. Why are you talking about newspapers. Well, because what social media has come to represent for us is a substitute for the traditional media. But because of traditional me free or fair or transparent people information from social media. Traditional media has become battleground where it's a powerful people powerful people own the newspapers the president owns a newspaper the deputy president owns a newspaper. The guy owns part of a radio station things like that it becomes it's become this battleground, especially around elections with a dissemination of hate speech with a dissemination of misinformation has become a focal point really for manipulation of public opinion. And so I wanted to lay down that groundwork and again I'm still fighting with my computer. So I wanted to actually see my, and actually see my presentation. Sorry, just bear with me for one minute. No, let's go. Okay. Okay. So, with that in mind, I wanted to just drill down a little bit on the info how the information landscape has changed in relation to elections in Kenya. We started when we started elections. Everything was analog that we had even we called the longer voting that people would stand in line behind their candidate, and then someone would come and count the people who are in line with the candidate. And that was how elections get one. We had a process this was all the way until 1988 1978 1982 that I think that the longer system was abandoned 1988 but then longer system was abandoned. Because what used to happen is that people would actually come down the line and just beat people and intimidate people to go and stand behind the candidate of choice. So when we went to the written ballots where people would write in ballots and then you had the ballot stuffing that people would actually come in and stuff the ballots with clothes with whatever, and then miraculously the result would be announced and the result would be different from what people had found. So, when we had the election violence in 2007, there was a deliberate efforts to stop all of these efforts of manipulation that had come before. What happened is that the, the process of reconciling the two parties who had fought in the 2007. There were a number of documents that were produced that were supposed to outline how the reconciliation reconstruction process would happen after that. And one of the key things that was in there was that to computers technology would become a core part of the electoral process in Kenya, because it would engender public trust this is literally in the documents that computers would be a way of ensuring public trust in election system and therefore should be deployed in elections in order to do that. So the process of incorporating tech in elections in Kenya is a deliberate effort to try and stop all of the previous instances of manipulation of miscommunication of misinformation that had happened in the previous election cycles. This explains why they had been such a massive spend between 2007 2017 in building a digital electoral system. Kenya have the first pilot of a digital election in Africa this was in 2011 with the line at with the line at a by election. What that meant was that there was one constituency where and it was one of the most contentious constituencies until 2011 within 2010, the new constitution or the completion of the new constitution. And that was the largest constituency by population in the country. And so the pilot process was supposed to try and find out how could tech starts to undo this process of violence that had been building up since 1988. The biometric voter registration so the collection of biometric voter information your fingerprints. We had electronic voter identification. We had the actual results transmission system. In 2013, there was an extended pilots to make this a month to do this across more constituencies so actually the 2013 election in Kenya was the first digital election in Africa. It was not completely digital. There was still aspects that were being done in the analog system, but already I started to raise the question that technology hadn't actually addressed the underlying contentious issues. I still ended up with a very questionable election outcome, especially many smaller constituencies, although it was much, it was a lot less contentious than what had happened in 2007. In 2017, we had the first fully digital election in Kenya. It's the second fully digital election in Africa so now maybe I had a fully digital election earlier, and thinking 2015. The key aspects in the information ecosystem that had that emerged were at multiple levels. One was tech being used to manipulate public opinion. And this is where we had the influence of companies like Cambridge and Jessica, like I told you that the average president in Kenya spends one. This is on t shirts, things like t branding and things like that. Well, in 2017, the president of Kenya spent the equivalent of $60,000 of $6 million shillings, just on this one company, just on. In order to get it came down to information. Readable. In every single county in the country. Map was done to map how people, the pressure points that people will respond. People would would incite people to go out and studies have found that companies that specialize in political influence, the issue that your candidate is the best candidate, convince you that the other is never going to act in your interest. So is to find those lines of fracture that are so in imagination, but we will never consider the issues. Of your. Algeria went where they were hired by the. The line that people have actually killed themselves over around political content. In Kenya, it was ethnicity, which as I mentioned, is also a line that people have killed themselves over. And anybody who has lived in a contentious political context will tell you, you cannot. It's not a political, it's not a policy position, it's not something that can be good or bad it's how I see myself and move in the world. So the information point that these political preference organizations, this are the things that they focus on to create lines of fracture in the US it's race. The UK it's also race in class that you as the voter feel yourself so threatened by the other person that you decide I'm not going to participate. I'm never going to vote for this person, even if his or her policies are so amazing. They don't have my identity interests at heart. So that's one level that is the level of the inputs, the information that people were using to decide their political behavior. And the other level of information is the information that was generated within the political ecosystem itself. And this is what I talked about your biometric or your voter ID, your physical location. Now the interesting thing that happened in 2017 can cause we were building this digital election. The government basically said we don't have the technical build this information we have to outsource. This is a French company. I'll see more for Safian or a Demia. If you've done biometrics, which a lot of countries, it deem is the one that builds the biometric voting. That you do the identity collection that you do at the airport when you get your fingerprint scan. So there's 19 in 2017, there were 19.2 million people registered to vote in Kenya. So just over half of the just under half the country's population. When we did the biometrics, all of your 10 things, but also your physical location, so to identify where you will be able to vote it brings you a maximum number of people who can vote at a specific polling station is 700 people. So it also has a very strong approximation of where you live. And in certain cases, if you don't live in a cosmopolitan area like Nairobi or any of the big towns, it also has a very close approximation of your ethnic identity. All of this information was provided to Otimo for Safran and Demia as part of the process of building the biometric voter registration. But what was not made transparent because the entire process of acquiring of contracting for that particular system was done irregularly. There was supposed to have been multiple bids only one bid was accepted and it was a Safran bid. It was supposed to have been subjected to public scrutiny it was not. There was supposed to have, there was so many irregularities with the contracting. And what ended up happening was that the biometric voter registration, our information, our identities, our everything about us that was containing a electoral voting system is now currently held as the intellectual property of this French company that actually we don't own that biometric information because it's owned by the private company. So how do we know this is a problem in after the election at the potential of the election there was a presidential election petition, where we basically said, please, we don't trust the outcome of this election and I'll go into some more detail about that later. We need to verify we need to audit the results and when the, when the lawyer for the opposition in court argued that we need to have access to the servers to audit the results. The lawyer for the president and the lawyer for the election commission said your honor, we cannot open the servers we cannot give you access to the servers because the servers are in France, and the people in France are asleep. So I think about what that means in terms of sovereignty in terms of what I said before about how elections have come the core focal point for the democratic process. What does it mean for the pink country when you cannot have access to the key information that you require at a key governance moment because it has been outsourced to a private company that no legislative oversight over that you have no financial oversight over that basically we don't own that information anymore. So that means that because it is a proprietary information that they monetize it without consent, but they can feed that information input that information into other systems into other ID systems into other ID based tech systems without our consent. I mean, when I started in the beginning I told you a little bit about what happened this morning and this weekend, and how we actually as Kenyans have no control over how, how the data that we produced was being allocated. This OPRP thing that happened with people being allocated political parties, no one knows how that happened. There's no public information. There's no accountability. We don't know what was being done in the back end. We don't know how they landed on all of this data because we when you register, I didn't register for a political party. People who are online complaining never registered for political party. So it's the election data being kind of another system without not voters, not companies or more have all of these ethos of private company and present built into how the system works. My computer is finally woken up. The other pieces of it was the question of surveillance and remember that I told you that it goes down a unit of 700 until 2020 Kenya didn't have a data protection law. And information as I said that was an expert. We didn't have any domestic legal framework for controlling how that information was expropriated. That being able to pinpoint people's location to the smallest level is actually feeding into this as an expanding its surveillance capacity. As I before came to a digital ID system like adhar in India. In fact, it's built on the logic is built almost one for one town. It collects all of these. It's all of your information about your identity and where you live. There's of combining this making this one true source of the digital so adding the election from adding the national health insurance data to that adding your basically making it a 360 ID system. The reason is that because of did you remember I told you the 700 units. It's almost all instances where these digital IDs have been deployed. It starts you first it's used first against critics of the state. The bloggers that the state doesn't like, and you'll see this this has happened at least once this year it has happened at least once a year, every year for the last seven years 2013 yet seven, eight years that someone will post something on Twitter. That is critical of the government, and will wake up in the middle of the night with the police and at their front door. So I wonder how did the policeman figure out where this person lives. How did they figure out who this is, like, especially if they're using an anonymous account. And the capacity capacity that has happened last year is built around this 360 data collection that's happening through all of these systems that are supposed to be distinct. The census information is supposed to be distinct from the elections information is supposed to be distinct is supposed to be a firewall between all of these information sources, so that if you're not enhancing the state surveillance capacity. But because there wasn't this particular legal framework built into how the election data especially was collected. There is no way of circumscribing the state's capacity to do this. And the last piece that I wanted to point out again is tied to identity which is discrimination and historical injustices. Our ideas, our ethnic system, our countries divided, imagine it's a square. And you have a line that is connecting the three largest cities which actually corresponds with the railway line. So, again, colonialism long history, all of that. 40% of the country's landmass is in the north of the country, the remaining 43% is in the south, but the vast majority of the country's population lives in the south, and not in the north. The systemic marginalization of people in the north is also built into the logic of the electoral system that most of the country's polling stations again corresponding to population but also corresponding to political will are in the south. And we have what happened with the elections is that the people in the north have a hard time getting ID systems, there's ID cards is a long history of denying people in the north ID cards, because of the presumption that they are quote unquote foreigners. That because Somali people, there's the Somalia the country. But there are more people who are ethnically Somali living in Ethiopia, then there are people who are living in the country of Somalia. There's a significant Somali population in Kenya, and the demographics again being connected to allocation of resources that if your county has a certain population you get more money from the budget, and has meant that there is a political interest in people in these specific in specific counties to be able to get more money but also in suppressing registration in marginalized communities so that they are not quote unquote overrepresented according to the political imagination of the people who are who are empowered. So, with the election what happens is there's a delivered efforts to suppress voter information that from the marginalized communities. You will have people who, for example, we have six levels of voting, and many people will vote for in the northern counties because they don't really feel politically connected to the south will vote for their member of county assembly that is the smallest unit of government will vote for their women's rep, because they know who the person is vote at the presidential level. And so someone will steal those ballots and input the data of their preferred happened at such a system systemic scale in the 2017 election, and was influenced in the results transmission system which was a digital system of results So, what really what we saw was that information because information had become such a valuable commodity around the election system that the manipulative information we saw governments individuals spending tremendous amounts of money to control the information ecosystem around the election. And this is before we even get into the question of misinformation and disinformation that is deliberately manipulating political information and media and all of these things which also happen. The results transmission system is a great example of this that you're supposed to vote, and on a paper, and they verify your biometrics, you get a ballot, you fill in the ballot, you put it in the box, they counter the ballots, they put all of the information on a piece of paper, every political party has an agent at the polling. So the agents verify that information, and they sign off on it, and then it's posted in a public place at the polling station so that anybody can come and see that. But also the person inputs the data into the system, and then that is immediately transmitted into the results transmission system to the National Tallying Center, and then that result is announced as the final result of that constituency. What happened was that people started to notice this about we have a week for counting ballots and about two days after the the election people to notice discrepancies between the information that was posted at the polling station, and the information that was being announced in the results transmission system. I was paying attention to one particular metric, which is what we call spoiled votes. In 2007, we had about 100,000 spoiled votes. In 2013, we had about another 100,000, 110,000 spoiled votes. In 2017, we had 8,000, and on Twitter, I know, I know, did we just collected the stupid in the five years between that election, because the population and it doesn't track with the increase in the number of voters. It doesn't track with, it's just basically just this spike in spoiled votes that is not consistent with any other statistical metric. So the spoiled votes that is spoiled vote is not counted. It doesn't count. It's basically a way of suppressing the voter turnout for a specific candidate that you say these X number of spoiled votes. But the number of spoiled votes that were being announced at the National Tallying Center did not correspond, as I said, with the numbers that were being posted at the polling station, but the agents have signed off on. And this is an aspect of tech actually doing a good thing because what people, what people started to do was they started to take screenshots of what was happening at the National Tallying Center was being announced, and was being announced at the RTS. And they would go to their polling station and take a photograph of what has been on the announced at the polling station and say, these numbers don't track. Where has my where is my form 34b was a way of six citizen signaling something is amiss these results are not consistent. I argue in my book that this effort of independent using the social media as an extension of the public sphere of independently verifying data is really one of the main reasons why the opposition had enough information to the election results so quickly because they did go to court. So this action being able to organize independently in this way, and it's become a practice in many African elections since then for civil society to actually use social media as a place to collect this information about what's not happening at the polling level and what's not happening at that level that the internet has actually, but that the tech, the internet and social media specifically has actually become a place where the public sphere can be engaged in accountability conversations. And, but of course it's not all, you know, champagne and roses power learns power adapts. So what has happened is that now there's a deliberate efforts to suppress what's happening on social media in Uganda. And you see at the government impact, not just this year but even the previous election switches off social media around elections to stop people from going online to have these accountability conversations. In the last shut down in Uganda I think lasted three weeks around the election. But now, not only did they because when they shut down happen people obviously went and got VPNs. The last election began in government made VPNs illegal in Nigeria, governments you know banning social media, because they don't want people to demand accountability on these platforms. So this is becoming the practice because, as I said, governments learn power learns and power adapts and people have to try and stay ahead of these conversations. I want to finish off on those examples of elections and election information manipulation, because I think that they highlight the challenge that lies ahead, you know you're talking on this project you're talking about blockchain and you're talking about, you know, trying to use electronic voter registration identification as a way of backstopping the political issues that arise with elections. I want to leave you with the lessons that we've learned in Kenya through this effort, as I said, of deliberately putting all this burden on technology to resolve all of these political issues. Some of the things that we've learned are this one is that the use of tech in this way and is an effort to sustain an illusion of democracy and democratic participation that isn't consistent with what political actors want. But actually you can't use tech as a substitute for the longer and deeper conversations that need to be had about inclusion and representation and power and society. That, you know, it's a shortcut, but it's a shortcut that isn't going to get you to the place where you want to be. You still have to do all of this other work on inclusion, you still have to do all of this other work on participation. And people love to give the exact Estonia and they say well Estonia has gone fully digital Estonia has one million people. And those one million people are all, or it's like one million or two million people it's a very small number, but many of them are from the same ethnic background that ethnic minorities. Estonia in Estonia is Russian of Russian descent it's a very small percentage of the population, and they are also often excluded from participating in this process because they're told, you are not Estonian you are Russian. Right and they can have the right circumvented in this way in heterogeneous societies like Kenya, where there isn't one group that is such an outlying majority. There's no shortcut to addressing some of these more complicated issues. You have to go to the roots of how do we address inclusive societies and tech will not answer those question. And I use the word illusion deliberately, because what it does is it makes it seem like you're having these conversations when actually what you're doing is you're obfuscating from this patients that we spent the 2017 election and Kenya was the most expensive election in the world to date. In India, which is the largest democracy, you know, take that as you will spend per person on an election is about $3 in the United States is about $5 in Kenya, we spent $28 per head on the 2017 election. And the result was just this week's late they did nothing for free, fair or transparent, which is the mid standard for electoral participation that as you can see that election is successful. So, so this illusion of, of, of, you know, efficiency of desire it allows government to get away from not having to do not having to have those harder conversations because they can say well we're spending all of this money, and we're putting this process. We don't allow spending on technology to become a distraction from the harder conversations that need to be had about how our marginalized communities, how are women, how are people with disabilities how are all of these people being incorporated into the democratic process. The fact also allowed people to mute dissent. Because, again, as I said, creating that illusion is something means that the key criticisms that we had of our elections from 1992 to 1998. We don't need to talk about commission commission anymore because look at what this shiny new things that they're building. They weren't the ethnic question was not being addressed. The question of inclusion was not being addressed. And because it, it's, you know, it's like, if I was to give you an analogy, it's like, you're moving, you know that game where people are like moving the cups around, there's a marble underneath, and the person who's moving the cups around knows where the marble is and you have to guess where it is. And but actually, it's a scam that the person has actually at some point, what they do is that knock the marble onto their lap. As you're kind of looking at that and then there isn't a marble underneath any of those cups. This is the kind of game that you've been playing that people are so focused on the moving so they don't realize that the marble has been knocked off the table. People are so focused on the illusion of we built this fancy expensive elaborates them that they are not asking the questions behind the question which is, but have we done all of this other background work. Tech in politics, what really happens is that it becomes a black box. What we saw was that people when we asked for the audit were being given all of these answers but we are not being given the results. The members of the public because they didn't understand the tech couldn't say well this is where this thing happened. When we were looking at the results transmission system. We noticed that every single gubernatorial race was posting was there was not every single one but the vast majority of the gubernatorial races were posting exactly the same results. 56% for the ruling party 43% for the main party in the position 11% like all of the results were coming out 5643, 5643, 8, 1.1 like copy paste copy paste copy paste copy paste copy paste. The reason why people flagged this was that savvy people statistically savvy people started to look at it and go. That's the statistical likelihood of that happening is improbable. It's 0.0001 that you can have 47 gubernatorial races, and 23 of them have statistically the same results on to two decimal places, it just wouldn't happen with the populations being disparate the composition of the populations being disparate so why was it happening. We couldn't get an answer because the system, the actual stuff that was in the process of what happened between the results being transmitted and they're also being announced, we didn't understand that technology. And then a really chilling thing is that the person who had tried to explain that who did understand the tech would try to explain it to us was the acting head of I see the electoral commission was assassinated two weeks before the election. As I say in the book, what does it mean when a bureaucrat this guy was a bureaucrat. He was not in the political party he was not campaigning for anybody, his only job was to understand the tech to explain the tech to members of the public. When bureaucrats start dying in the course of their job, when they start getting assassinated in the course of their work, you know that something has started to go terribly wrong. That this person was the only person who could log into the back end at a national level with his fingerprints was the only person who at the back at that national level had the clearance the security clearance to make the kind of adjustments that would be needed to make that that outcome of 56 points something 43 point something, and he was assassinated, and the official corner report of his body was that he was tortured before he was killed. There are political issues that building a technically sound system isn't going to help you address. And when people can't explain what happened to their vote, what happened to their identity information, then they are unable to demand accountability. When people can't explain what happened between me standing in the ballot line, and this announcement being put on this website. I can't say this is why this is wrong. And so that is how tech can inadvertently mute dissent and commute the demands for accountability because it takes all of our information and puts in a black box that we no longer have oversight over. And finally this ties to my final point which is the manipulation of narratives, the control of narratives, what if you don't understand and you can't demand accountability then you have to go with the story, the powerful person the person who built the tech tells you happened with your information, you have to go with what it is that they tell you because you don't know, you don't have a countervailing narrative you don't have a countervailing story. The 2017 election in Kenya we actually had two presidential elections, because the August vote was thrown out by the courts, and I watched that proceeding very closely, I have a law degree and I was trying to see how this thing was going to go. And what you saw was that the people who were the lawyers for the electoral commission the lawyers for the presidents and lawyers for all the people who were sort of defending the results had control over the story of the election, because they understood the technology in a way that the judges who were supposed to make this determination didn't, they didn't understand that information the same way. And so that ability to control narratives that ability to control information is by an extent by extension and ability to control the public sphere that if I tell you that this is the story of the election. And you can provide me with a narrative with a counter narrative, and you can explain to me what else happened, then I control the information that's in the public screen, I can tell you this election was free fair I don't know what you're talking about. When election observers, almost every election in Kenya has had international election observers, and what the election observers did at the end of the first vote the August vote is that they signed off, because they said that the election was conducted the technical analysis that was set out by the Electoral Commission, but civil society and the opposition everybody was saying, this just isn't true that the standards haven't been met because look at these big question marks and they can't tell us why these question marks are happening, but the election observers because they have to go in the narrative, the official narrative, they sign off on the vote and they say free fair credible. And now the whole process of election observation in Africa is under scrutiny and is being questioned because of the 2017 election in Kenya. Because of what happened in 2017 with the difference between the official narrative and the electoral observation narrative and what's domestic civil society said actually happened. It's really only good that we do have a strong civil society in Kenya that they had a parallel tallying system, because in a country that didn't have such a strong civil society they wouldn't have been that countervailing voice. They wouldn't have anybody to say, actually, no, this isn't happening. And this is happening in other less observed elections all over the world right now. So I just, I wanted to leave you with those thoughts and my computer is still frozen but I wanted to leave you with those. As I said, I'm not a. I'm not a techie. I'm not going to be able to tell you that a blockchains election system has to meet these XYZ standards in order to be considered free fair and transparent incredible. I will tell you what technical standards are necessary for biometric voter registration or electronic voter identification to be able to be considered free for incredible. What I can tell you is that in the public sphere. Elections have become so important. So, in fact, unfairly important to the health of a democracy that it's not just about technical standards. They also systems, the electronic voter systems also have to meet certain political standards also have to meet certain social standards in order to be able to rise to the level where we can say it is protecting and advancing democracy, rather than undermining it. And some of those standards are a little bit softer. You're not going to say here's the checklist, and we've hit the checklist and therefore it's okay. Trust is not something that can be measured on a one to one basis. Trust is something that is earned. Trust is something that is earned and the input that gets us trust is transparency that you have to tell people. Give them information, let them decide whether it's too much or it's too little, give them all the information that they need because when you have that black box approach, the questions. It almost doesn't matter. What happened that once the questions start to come out on the other end, people are going to lose faith in the entire system. And what happens, they go to the streets, they go to protest they go to the other mechanisms in the public sphere that they need to communicate dissent to communicate rejection and some of those systems. Once you undermine them once you trigger that mistrust right now today in Kenya, we are still dealing with the mistrust that was engendered in 2017. What happened today with the identity systems with all those questions is rooted in what happened in 2017. The fact that we're now going to another election, and people have less trust in elections and they did before 2017 because of the technology is a huge problem. Because it means that what the stakes are high and people need to project or communicate their dissent 2022. It might not just stop at protest. It might stop at other forms of excessive of violence. It might stop at other forms of communicating dissent. And, yeah, to just reemphasize that the political measures are just as important, and the social measures are just as important as the technical measures. So bring people into your advocacy conversations, bring people into your organizing conversations who also understand the political aspects, who also understand the social aspects, because once those are undermined is much harder to restore than a technical system. It's much harder to rebuild a democracy once you've broken it, and a trust in a democracy once you've broken it, but it is to rebuild an IT system from scratch and say well we didn't like this one because it didn't hit our political standards. Let's go back and let's start from scratch. I'm going to stop there because I've been talking for a long time. Thank you. And I hope your computer finally managed to get back to life at some point. Yeah, I was wondering if you would be able to share some of the insights that you have had from the world that you are doing on not just iPhone but research on the end to the voting system. Sure, sure. So, basically I've been working on systems related to electronic voting for like, I think four years now. Initially I was involved in the technical audit of the I would system which is an internet voting system that Pakistan deployed. And after that I've been working on end to end where a viable systems because as Angela pointed that the need for technical systems is not to be black boxes but that they need to be transparent and the visibility needs to be there for the public to see that each process has been done according to the standards required for a democracy. Apart from that I'm also so basically I'm working on how we can, how we can adapt where if I will voting into the context of developing countries and specifically in the context of Pakistan. And also I'd like to say that an Angela, she pointed, like she talked on a few very interesting streams from preparation of electoral roles and how at that point only you can disenfranchise waters and then coming to a topic of misinformation in the election cycle. And then also the fetishization of technology in the developing world specifically with relation to Kenya as she told us about. And then the related issues of, you know that if you kind of do such an undertaking, you need to have the capacity and the financial resources to undertake that. And then before all this happens you need to have a certain level of trust in the system and unless and until you haven't built that trust to go ahead with any of these technical interventions would not be a very wise decision so yeah. There are a few questions, at least two of them are very specific and I'd like to sort of get them out of the way. Harish Berle asks, what is electoral bond? If most are not familiar with it, electoral bonds essentially are something up in monetary instruments that was introduced in India so that citizens of corporate groups can buy from a bank and give to a political party, which is then free to redeem them for money. The idea is that this is an alternative to the cash donation system which was thought of being creating a whole parallel economy with money being siphoned off and all of that so but it is a contentious system. The opacity is often criticized and critically reviewed. The question that Harish had as what is an electoral bond was a follow up with Sarvaka Mahesh I had asked, does Kenya have a similar electoral bond system that exists? No, no. But right now, you can give money to a political party directly. What tends to happen is people tend to do private fundraising, it's not really fundraising, it's buying influence. And then you also get money from the government so the political, the electoral commission is supposed to, I'm not sure how much they've done it but they're supposed to give political parties a small amount of money. And that was supposed to reduce the amount but most people, this is why politics have become so high stake because people put all of their life money savings, whatever, whatever they borrow, beg, steal into winning the seat. And then when they are in power, they think about their job is to get all of that money back. And so then they beg, borrow, steal everything and then it becomes a cycle. So they don't want to lose the office because if they lose the office they lose the money. But we don't have election bonds in Kenya, at least not that I know of. I've read the election law quite closely, I don't think we have election bonds. Right. The other question that Harish had is what's the public sphere in India called we have the speakers corner here in Singapore, similar to the UK's namesake. That's an interesting question because in India I think the public sphere has quite a lot of levels and obviously I'm not an expert to talk about it. One of the slightly more iconic ones that have been in the news recently for various political movements obviously Siram Leela Maidan in Delhi and Sia, where a whole set of activities around politics happen. But if I do get to know the specific solution, I'm going to read some kind of. There's another question from Goyal I guess he says that is there any motion proposed to allow water registration with mother's name to. I think it to him it sounds quite limited to father's name Lea. It's incredibly patriarchal, it's incredibly patriarchal and you have for example, women, the people who are children of single parents who have a hard time getting ID cards, and you have people who move, right, or who have difficult relationships with their father and don't want to talk to their fathers and told you have to go and find your father and you have to go and get this information. It's incredibly patriarchal and it's incredibly discriminatory. There has been a lot of conversation about changing this under the new ID system and so I think there are a lot of people who have asked for exceptions, you know, but there is not enough and this is why I spent a lot of time talking about the questions behind the questions that people are so focused on the technical aspects of the digital ID card that it's become very difficult to get some of the political conversations on the table. So, like, as in India, our digital ID is this push the ID for the push behind is also coming from the World Bank and IMF and the big institutions and there's a big interest in having these projects completed that the political questions are not getting the attention that they deserve. Thankfully, we've had the Nubian rights forum, which took the Puduma number, which is the digital ID, they took them to court over it because of this reason, because a lot of Nubian people, it's a group that is systemically marginalized by the central and they said, if you don't address the history of marginalization that we have dealt with this digital ID is just going to make it worse. And so you have to go back and fix all of this other stuff and they actually won was a partial win. They won a lot of things and they want a suspension of the digital ID until some of this other stuff is done. But that question and the many other questions of ethnicity and ethnic ID. These are the global questions that nobody seems to want to to deal with. Right, right. So, Manjula you talked about social media right as I see it it's a double edged sword, it seems, because, while on one hand we have something as revolutionary as you Shahidi coming out of it. It's the home ground for spreading misinformation, right. So how do you see it. Do you think that technology has made the fight against misinformation easier. Does it provide a widely accessible platform for like maybe alternate or counter narratives or do you think it kind of suppresses, you know, these original narratives and pushes forward misinformation more. I think it is a double edged sword, I think it's a bit of it's a bit of everything. What I think happens is for a long time. People didn't believe that social media would take off in Africa that the social media companies, everybody thought that the main markets was, you know, first the US and then Europe and then India and then Brazil and nobody was really paying attention to what was happening in Africa. And because there wasn't that much attention, a lot of really cool things could happen, because we had kind of this space to do stuff, the attention of bad acts. So I spent a lot of time in my book talking about that that people were able to build new communities of belonging people were able to fundraise for key it like it just became it was it for a long time it was a positive space. The numbers start to go up, and then it becomes a big market, and then you attract obviously more bad actors and so 2017 election in Kenya, the 2013 election Kenya you have governments as I said, spending the more on influencing conversation discourse online, then they're spending on anything else other aspects of the government and they're bringing in the experts who have been spear spearheading misinformation campaigns in the United States and the United Kingdom and they bring them into big elections in Nigeria in Kenya and South Africa. So now the bellwether is kind of tilted more in the in the negative direction that because there is so much money being spent on shaping whether it's spending on bots, spending on inauthentic, what do they call them inauthentic autonomous conversations so they're real people, but they're being paid to put forward certain lines of conversation, certain lines of discourse. Yesterday, Monday, Facebook announced that he had taken down 87,000 posts relating to Ethiopian politics because it was accounts that were real people but being used to post certain lines of conversation by the government by the state. So, right now the bellwether is being in a negative in a negative direction. And what I, the argument I'm making the book and the argument that I make everywhere is this is a question of agency. It's going to be what we make it out to be. It's going to be social media, you know, in 2000, the main culprit was not social media it was radio. The main place where misinformation and hate speech and all of that was spread was radio. We're not going to ban radio, we're not going to tell people you can't have radios. What we do is we build systems that allow for the agency of people to shape radio outlets, output positively to stop the dissemination of misinformation and hate speech. I think that's what we have to do with social media as well. But the social media companies also have to be willing to be constrained. The governments also have to be willing to make good laws. And, and that's the weird space that we're in that the social media companies don't want to be constrained governments don't want to make good laws because they think this thing is just children and they're troublesome children. The other Nigerian president called him the Nigerians online he said they're troublesome children. And so nobody really is doing using their agency to actually shape these spaces in a positive pro citizen way. So, Angela, there's one more question. Are there any preventive tactics used by a Kenyan digital citizens. I guess the same question has been asked by by Jacka. One of the example that I gave of where is my phone 34b I think is a really good example of how citizens use their agency to turn social media platform that was not designed for any of this to become a place for demanding accountability and having these accountability conversations. And we've seen that repeatedly in Kenya that because the analog systems don't work people go on even with this particular incident that I mentioned that happened yesterday and today. I've been tweeting at the office of the registrar political parties have been sharing information it was it was social media people who flagged it first. So, because of that practice and the civil society in Kenya, you know made really effective use of digital systems as well and be everywhere all the time but they tried to get election observers parallel election observation missions that were coordinating online. Same thing happened in Nigeria, same thing happened in Senegal, it's going to become I think more common for people to use unexpected platforms in this way to coordinate and to support these parallel accountability measures. People are building outright platforms, I think building outright platforms a little bit more difficult, but we've had success with platforms like Muzalendo Muzalendo does civic observation of parliament legislatures but also elections, and it's a little bit difficult because you're, you have to also attract the audience. So I have to make people use the platform, whereas with social media that people are already there, and you're just kind of like organizing them. But those are the kind of things that we're seeing I think it's going to become much more common. It's definitely become much more common in Africa for people to use for civil society to use and individuals to use digital platforms in this way. Another thing is the role of perhaps EMBs, Electoral Management Bodies, to kind of counter such kind of misunderstanding or are they even equipped to monitor and then probably take legal action against any such, you know, coordinated attempts on a large scale. This is really funny. The last very last event that I did before the lockdown in March last year was speaking to the heads of EMBs in Africa about social media was talking giving a presentation. And this conference was amazing, but the really interesting thing for me was that, depending on the nature of the country. People had different experiences and therefore different answer about what the best role for EMBs with regards to tech, and with regards to social media specifically. And so you had countries where the head of the EMB was really passionate and really wanting to deliver a good election. And they were like we used to get to do this and we did awareness and this and this. And then you had EMBs who had this approach that I said about president, these are troublesome children. I don't want them near my election. I don't want them to touch my election. I want them all arrested. I have this full blackout for every election. And so I send me back to my original point which is, it depends on the nature of the society in question I don't think that there is one answer. I think that if a government, if they're underlying socio political motivation is to build more just and inclusive societies, then the use of social media will be an extension of that. I think social media to reach people to announce to counter disinformation the South African government has great examples, the South African Election Commission has great examples of how they actually use social media to counteract misinformation campaigns and to do all of that. And then you have election commissions that are actually needed in spreading misinformation, actually the ones were using it most to spread misinformation so you know why I don't think that there is one. You know why I think the point is so important is that probably in developing countries, the masses or the public probably do not realize how powerful this misinformation could be how much it could go against them. For instance, what happened in the capital on January 6 is said to be a culmination of the misinformation that had happened in the year past. And so I'm thinking that probably in developing societies where literacy levels are low such means misinformation would kind of maybe cause greater problems greater issues violence and whatnot. Yes and no. Yes and no. So, in yes, the risks of what will people do when they reached that level are definitely higher. But you know what's really interesting and this is certainly the case in Kenya. When a society is accustomed to receiving propaganda. They are also less trustful of information of both good and bad information. So what we see in Kenya, there was a survey I said it to it in the book that said 97% canyon voters had seen information in the lead up to the election of this 97 of Kenya voters sample. But that also means that 97% of Kenyan voters knew that misinformation. They knew that there was a deliberate effort to try and get them misinformed. What we see in societies where propaganda has been a big part where people are conditioned to mistrust of the biggest the number one spreader of misinformation in Kenya is the government of Kenya. The people who do most to try and misinform people is the government. And so people are naturally skeptical of information of misinformation that comes from official channels. And this happened with the COVID as well, that when the first wave of information was, yeah, bought into, you know, I just go and if I just drink lemon juice and I do this do this I will not get COVID. But after a while, the spread of misinformation started to taper off. It started to slow down. And the real information started to take off. And that is because they're already systems in the society whether you're talking about civics society civil society, whether you're talking about fact checking, whether you're talking about, there already is that predisposition to disbelieve, and then to question, and then to spread good information. So it's, it's a little bit, little bit less linear than that. And again, comes down to what was the nature of the society before tech. How did information spread before tech, how did misinformation spread before. If you are primed for disbelief, you will respond to information differently than if you are primed for belief. And I think that's the that's something to pay attention to. I have a question from the dark. He's asking, can you speak more about parallel ballot counting systems. Yeah, I mean that's what I was talking about with the where are from 34 be in countries like Kenya where elections are deeply contentious. What is happening more and more is that media houses are running exit polls and parallel tallying, but also civil society in Kenya organized independent election observation, and they had agents so anybody anybody can register as an organization to have an agent at the polling station if you get the support of the election commission. So they had that network of observation, and you had election observers don't count votes, they just observe the process of voting but you have extensive presence of election observers with the civil society what's increasingly happening in Kenya in Nigeria and Senegal is that they will then do the parallel tallying counting on social media, because it's the only way to have a national system, so they will have people texting results the ones I told you that are being posted at the polling station screenshots text sense to the centralized system and then the centralized system treats that out that happened in Senegal and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the biggest parallel tallying system is actually run by the Catholic Church, because in a lot of African countries the Catholic Church has the most extensive social welfare network in the country so they will be running schools and churches and hospitals and things like that and so the Catholic Church and the DRC organized a parallel voting system the same logic that I talked about, and then they collected all the results, and they told the official election commission, whatever you're announced, we have data, we have information, we have all of this hard data, so we'll know if you're telling the truth, if you're not telling the truth and so they said we will not announce what we have found until you announce what you have found and that was a demand for accountability, so this is becoming much much much more common in places where people don't have trust in the official results and they don't have trust in what the government is announcing as the election results, we're seeing more and more of these parallel tallying and votes counting systems So we see that a lot of these EMBs are you know politicized maybe and towards that end, Harish Pille has a question he says that is the Kenyan Election Commission an independent entity, how are and who appoints the individuals to the commission Harish, what do you want me to tell you The first word in the election commission title is independence, it is the independent election and boundaries commission It is none of those things, and the lack of independence, it's complicated, it's what they tried to do, constitutionally it is independent Politically what they tried to do to lock that independence in was that the political parties would nominate the commissioners and so the political parties would have same way that you have in the polling station level, different agents from the different political parties have to sign off So the logic was that if seven commissioners, if all the major political parties have a say in appointing through parliament confirming the commissioners, then it would be independent at the national level In practical terms, this hasn't really worked out. In practical terms, we had a commissioner who had to go into hiding, who had to flee the country As I told you we had the acting head of ICT was assassinated, we had the chairperson going on TV and saying, I don't know what's happening, I don't know, you know, I can't guarantee the outcome of these elections And other commissioners, it's in practical terms, again in political, I cannot in good conscience say that the election commission in Kenya is independent, and I don't think that they can say in good conscience that the election commission is independent So again, it goes back to you have to understand the nature of the society in question, like, you can have the, we Kenya has many analysts and legal scholars have said Kenya has one of the best constitutions in paper, one of the most progressive constitutions on paper, but that doesn't mean anything if people don't obey the law, and doesn't mean anything if power doesn't respect law. So, that's the answer. It's so much to this conversation that it's not just we have been there before but more, more like, hang on, this seems to be something that we have seen, heard and felt. This is one of the reasons why I really wanted to be in this conversation because we borrow so much from India we borrow so much, as I told you our digital ID copy paste our demonetization copy paste. And so, I think South South conversations really need to be the norm, because we are borrowing from each other is good, but also from each other is bad right like we are, we are being given standards by Western Eastern institutions. But that don't reflect our realities and our commonalities and I think South South conversations when it comes to tech need to be the norm need to be more common because we can avoid we can tell each other hey, this is coming down the pipeline. We went through it and it's not doesn't end well and hopefully, you know, organize a little bit more effectively around some of these common shared issues. Yeah, I think the other thing that came up, we did, we did as an experiment to Twitter spaces, just to have some conversations on this. And one of the things that came up in the early parts of that Twitter spaces was, okay so all of you think that blockchain is a bad idea so what's a good idea what the other alternative solution. And this is the kind of technosolutionism that I think often leads us down a spiral where we kind of forget to analyze and frame the issues in context where they should be. And instead try and say okay this one doesn't work. So let's get this new shiny some on somewhere because here there's a new research paper that seems very promising and must deploy at nation scale because that's how things will work. All right, so I know we've been having a whole bunch of conversations I have seen having I don't know why there's a whole sidebar of conversation that I'm not turning up into questions I'm going to do a call for questions, remarks or anything to participants who are joining us on zoom on the YouTube just to check that we kind of get some of the other points in. We do have folks who have had previous participated and have had remarks. Anyone would like to speak or have questions. And then yes, we have to circle back to what is the problem we are solving but I'll do in this case I think for elections. The topic is fairly well research. I think the trouble happens is that when we try and forget that some of the problems are the issues that we are trying to address the technology are not really novel, they have been existing for a while and we have had working systems that could be improved ripping out an existing system and putting in something brand new untested is always dangerous and that's more often than not digital nation scale systems tend to have that idea. Okay, call for remarks and comments as we lead up to a close of this session. Would anyone be having some remarks. I don't want to call out names and put people on the spot but I think that's quite unfair. I'm not checking the YouTube mostly and I'll definitely have in terms of whether they make a marks on YouTube. No questions. Already, I think folks have been seriously stupefied and bamboozled by the fact that there are there is this is like a freight train coming in, if, if we do this coffee wholesale, and if we don't pay enough attention. Before we just wrap this up and I have like a one minute spiel that I do usually for our project to wrap this up. I'll leave it to the speakers and moderators if they want to share some remarks and insight. So yeah, I think all I'd say is that, you know, we see all these developing countries kind of rushing with technology. I think we need to kind of step back have a look. Where is it really required where can we do without it. And we've seen a lot of developed countries rolling back, you know their technological aspirations and projects. And is that something we need to do. That should be one option on the table, I would say that's all towards from my side. Yeah, I do wish governments had this option where they examine a piece of legislation or regulation or even a decision that they can say, Hang on. That's probably not the best idea that's kind of walk back from that and then try and do it in a better way doesn't often happen. And I don't remember often. It's happened in Germany when I think there was this position who filed in kind of complaint or whatever that you know because they do not know the internal working of the EVM system. So it's not something that should be used and I think the project was kind of rolled back but yeah it doesn't happen often that's so true. So I know one of the things that we get feedback is that you organize one webinar and kind of that's what's next and what's happening and the thing about this project is that even though we have the call for evidence open for a while, I think we will probably extend it a bit more. The idea is to continue to have the conversations the we will use the call for evidence and the, and the knowledge that we get from these conversations to be able to produce a report that we hope to present to those who are exploring the changes in our research institution. And also, we hope that others who are facing similar challenges would be able to share and learn from what we are doing going to run to be able to make things better in a collective citizen action matter. We will have a few webinars lined up or July is quite packed for us, but we want to keep the conversation happening. We have a telegram channel which is there on our webpage, and we need to subscribe to our project, you will get updates, infrequent updates we are we know don't spam folks with a whole lot of updates every other day, because we know that's the best way of helping people are deaf. That's about it. I think we'll bring this one home. I'd like to absolutely thank Nina and I, for taking time today. Thank you, Angela, who's had challenges, but we have sort of pushed through them and had this conversation. Hopefully, this is going to allow us to have a better way to examine this situation where the proposal of blockchain being introduced exists on the table for us in India.