Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (23 page)

A single, centralized voter enrolment system, running the same multilingual software across the country, would allow you to enrol at multiple points. The bottlenecks that exist currently would be removed and the enrolment process could easily be scaled up to cover the entire nation. In such a system, no one enrolment agency would
hold a monopoly; there would be no incentive for distortions, biases and fraud, eliminating the entire political economy that has muddied voter registrations. When we already have a centralized system capable of storing the Aadhaar data of 1.2 billion Indians, there is no reason why we can’t build a similar system for voter ID data as well.

Transparency is a second, equally important attribute. As part of the government’s open-data initiative, voter lists should be made available for anyone to inspect in a machine-readable format, one that any computer can recognize and process. That is not the case today; voter rolls are available only in formats that computers cannot read, which means that you have to download the data manually and build your own software to read and analyse them, unless you are up to the task of sifting through hundreds upon thousands of entries yourself. As we will discuss in the next chapter, one of the first tasks that FourthLion Technologies—a Bengaluru-based start-up that developed the technology for Nandan’s Lok Sabha campaign from Bangalore South—undertook was to write the software that would digitize and clean up Bangalore South’s voter lists, a process that took months.

P.G. Bhat, a retired navy commander, software engineer and social activist, has spent years scanning electoral rolls, and found over 1 million errors in Karnataka’s voter rolls. An article in the
Business Standard
profiling his efforts reports:

. . . he found a 4,818-year-old man in the voter lists of Bangalore. And there was more: Over 13,000 voters had more than one wife, 1,829 had ‘female’ husbands, 502 were under 18 years of age and 96 were above 120 years along with hundreds of thousands of possible voters with two—even three, records—spread across different constituencies in Karnataka. Shocked after discovering over 1 million instances of errors in the electoral rolls, Bhat took the Karnataka Election Commission to court and with some legal intervention managed to get many errors rectified before the assembly election earlier this year.
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What was Bhat’s motivation? He is quoted in the article:

‘I don’t see what I do as activism. I am not interested in shouting slogans or gheraoing,’ says the soft-spoken Bhat. He might have a different term for it, but there is no getting away from the fact that for the past couple of years Bhat has devoted most of his energy and time—up to twelve hours a day—to the one-of-its-kind cause. ‘I don’t want to fight the system, I want to work with it.’

While we must be grateful for the efforts of concerned citizens like Bhat, his story only highlights how desperately India’s voter rolls need error correction and greater oversight, possible only by making them transparent. The Bengaluru-based NGO Janaagraha has also put in a great deal of effort into cleaning up voter rolls, working together with the EC on a system they’ve christened PURE (Proper Urban Electoral) Roll Management System. A survey they performed in New Delhi in 2015 found that nearly 22 per cent of the names on the voter list need to be updated or deleted as these individuals were not found at their listed address.
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Any changes to the voter list should be clearly visible, and all political parties and citizens should be brought on board with the process so as to forestall any allegations of malpractice. Equally important, individuals should be able to view their voter records easily so that any errors in their record can be quickly noted, a process that can be made faster through automation. Once the data is available, political campaigns can use it as a single source of truth. The data can be accessed with a simple device like a smartphone or a tablet. As we will discuss in the next chapter, one of the most successful technological innovations in Nandan’s campaign was also among the simplest—a digital voter roll that people could look up on a smartphone, making it easy to find voter data and to direct people to the correct polling location. Many volunteers told us of people who landed up at the wrong polling booth, or whose data was missing in the list of voters, and who would have had to return home without casting their vote if volunteers hadn’t looked up the correct data on the digital roll. Now
imagine if we could build a digital voter roll for every voter in the country, one that was accessible to both officials and the people. The electoral process would become much smoother for everyone, errors would be quickly caught and corrected, and nobody would be denied their lawful right to vote.

In our opinion, the most effective way to strengthen India’s electoral process is by linking voter IDs to Aadhaar numbers, a view that is shared by the country’s current administration. Earlier this year, former CEC H.S. Brahma announced that the databases of Aadhaar and the voter ID—the Electoral Photo ID Card, or EPIC—would be synchronized with each other, a task expected to reach completion by early 2016. In a public address, he was quoted as saying, ‘We have decided to embed the Aadhaar data on our platform of the EPIC . . . Once we are able to do this, we will have 100 per cent purity of the (electoral) rolls. Once these two data come together there will be correct name, biometrics and address of an individual. The day we do that, 99 per cent of complaints of political parties and candidates about electoral rolls will disappear.’
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The scheme to link Aadhaar with the voter ID was officially launched in March 2015 under the moniker of the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP).
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The potential benefits of meshing Aadhaar with the voter ID rolls are explained in the accompanying diagram. The linkage will automatically confer Aadhaar’s key attribute—uniqueness—to a voter ID, and the individual’s biometric data can be used to authenticate their identity. Once the two are connected, cross-checking IDs and weeding out duplicates would become an easily solvable problem. It would also be remarkably effective at eradicating voter fraud, since a person with the same biometric data can’t vote again or vote as someone else. Creating a fake voter profile would become so complicated that no would-be election rigger would bother trying. As Brahma commented, ‘India will be the only country in the world where there
will be complete biometric of voters. Also, there will not be a single fraud or duplicate voters.’
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Once the Aadhaar linkage is in place, a suite of ‘smartphone first’ applications can allow every aspect of the voting process—voter registration, address changes, polling booth information, perhaps even casting one’s ballot—to be available to us on our smartphones. In a perfect world, we should be unrestricted even in the choice of polling stations—rather than having to vote at a specific polling booth to which we have been assigned, we should be able to walk into any polling station in any part of the country, have our voter ID number and identity obtained and verified through the cloud, and cast our vote instantly. Estonia, one of the most digitally advanced nations on the planet, has already leveraged its national ID programme to allow citizens to vote using their mobile phones; one happy citizen took to Twitter to share that it took just two minutes to vote—‘being hundreds of miles away from home. How awesome is this?’
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It may be a while before India’s voting process reaches equal levels of awesomeness, given that hundreds of millions of people have to cast their vote on election day and the entire process needs to be completely watertight. In the meantime, using Aadhaar for identity verification during the voter registration process would be a good start. Every enrolment or update centre designated by the EC should be equipped with a biometric reader. The registration process will use Aadhaar to verify the person’s identity and demographic data. The new address details will be downloaded by the EC’s system and the voter will be assigned a polling station at which they can vote. The cut-off for revisions can be set at one month before the election, at which time the final voter rolls are prepared. The delivery of the updated voter ID can be the responsibility of the postal system, in the same way that we worked with India Post for the delivery of Aadhaar letters. This can complete the final leg of address verification, while simultaneously saving the voter from having to make several trips to the point of enrolment.

One interesting use of electronic voting has recently been proposed by the government to allow military personnel to vote.
Currently, they receive ballot papers in the mail, which they have to fill in and return via India Post. Under the new proposal, once their voter IDs have been linked to Aadhaar numbers, selected areas will be equipped with biometric authentication devices; Aadhaar authentication will be used to verify their identity, after which they can cast their vote electronically. Officials envision that such an electronic voting system will act as a ‘technology-driven solution where people can vote, which reaches on time, does not get lost or is not tampered with’.
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Former CEC N. Gopalaswami suggests that Aadhaar can also serve as a tagging device for new voters to be enrolled. Since Aadhaar numbers are now being issued to all Indian residents from birth onwards, the database can be set to automatically flag those Aadhaar holders who turn eighteen in a given year, making them eligible to vote. Rather than putting the onus of enrolment on the citizen’s shoulders, the government itself can now initiate the enrolment process for such individuals. The many benefits of an Aadhaar-linked voter ID are explained in the diagram that follows.

Using many of the ideas we delineate above, we can take our voter lists and elections to the next level of transparency, accountability and fairness. Technology can help to make the electoral process more convenient for citizens. A centralized voter system will make life easier for citizens while eliminating fakes, ghosts and duplicates. It will be capable of spotting fraud as it happens—a system that credit card transactions already rely on. If it can work for your credit card, it should work for your vote.

Elections are the foundation of our democracy, a democracy that represents an unflinching commitment by our country to every citizen, granting them a voice in the form of a vote. If citizens lose faith in our electoral process, we lose one of the cornerstones of our nation. A constant process of institution-building over the decades has seen us withstand many challenges. It is only technology that gives us the
kind of scale and reach we need to further strengthen our electoral processes and build a truly inclusive democracy, one in which every citizen can exercise their most fundamental right, that of choosing the leaders who will shape the future of their country.

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

—Abraham Lincoln

WHEN NANDAN DECIDED to contest the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from the Bangalore South constituency, he reached out to several people for ideas and advice on how to plan and execute his campaign. One of them was Andrew Claster, deputy chief of analytics for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. Nandan, Viral and two other colleagues, Shankar Maruwada and Naman Pugalia, sat down with Andrew to strategize. Obama’s campaign had made headlines for its innovative, heavily technology-driven approach; what were the main principles on which it had been run? To our surprise, Andrew pointed us to a document that had been written 174 years ago, by none other than Abraham Lincoln.
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In short, the entire campaign plan consisted of building a multilayered organization designed to reach out to every voter, meeting the voters face-to-face and convincing them to vote for your candidate. These fundamentals of electioneering are as relevant today as they were 174 years ago; in Andrew’s words, ‘Many of the
innovations of today’s campaigns involve simply employing technology, data and predictive modelling to enhance and make more efficient the same basic functions as were outlined by Lincoln in 1840.’

The campaign that Nandan and his team eventually ran took the standard operating manual of Indian politics—public campaigns, rallies, photo-ops, constituency tours—and garnished it with a liberal dose of technology. Whether it was creating a digital voter roll, running targeted advertisements or interacting with voters, technology was the invisible scaffold on which all the programmes were built and run. And our approach was far from being an outlier; as we shall see, many players in today’s political arena are using technology to establish stronger ties with the people.

We believe that the software, technology and processes that political parties build will serve as valuable intellectual property for them, creating a platform that every candidate will be able to use. This will then become the lifeblood of the campaign and the central playbook from which all candidates can draw, ensuring the delivery of a strong and consistent message that people can relate to. Despite the huge effort involved in creating this sort of centralized model, political parties stand to benefit a great deal. In the long run, candidates will choose to stay with parties that make it easier for them to run their campaigns. It will also create a cadre of trained party workers, giving parties a competitive edge when it comes to gaining and retaining good candidates.

We’ve already seen this in effect in the past few elections. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) campaigns in Delhi in 2013 and 2015 were, to borrow software terminology, Version 1.0 of the party as a platform. Narendra Modi’s national campaign in 2014 was Version 2.0, and perhaps the next general election of 2019 will be Version 3.0, the full-fledged implementation of the ‘party as a platform’ strategy, with nationwide scale and the ability to manage the electoral campaigns of all candidates within the party. The diagram that follows illustrates what we think the new face of technology-driven campaigns will be.

Starting in November 2013, many residents of New Delhi—housewives, rickshaw drivers and small-business owners alike—received phone calls from supporters of the AAP, asking if they would ‘vote for the broom’. Not too unusual, except for the fact that the volunteers making these calls, people like Mohan Thirumalai, an IT manager, were sitting not in Delhi, or even in India, but thousands of miles away in the USA. Every night, Thirumalai would start making the first of around sixty calls, drumming up support for the party. Many other volunteers took sabbaticals from their jobs, or quit altogether and came back to India just to work for the AAP’s cause.
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This was just one of the many innovative strategies that the AAP employed to contest elections in New Delhi. Many of these ideas arose from an earlier, non-political movement, India Against Corruption (IAC), spearheaded by the Gandhian reformer Anna Hazare; the AAP founder and maverick former bureaucrat Arvind Kejriwal was also a prominent figure in that campaign. The IAC was the first social movement in modern memory to be embraced enthusiastically by the middle class, otherwise notoriously gun-shy. How did they manage to achieve this connect with the people? They were quick to recognize and exploit the power of technology to reach out to large numbers of people while keeping costs low.
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One example was their use of that ingenious, uniquely Indian method of communication—the missed call. In IAC’s missed call campaign, those who wished to express their support simply had to dial a specific number and then hang up; a bulk SMS campaign was launched to encourage people to call. In a span of three months, IAC racked up over 25 million missed calls. Their Facebook page had over a million followers, while their smartphone app had as many as 50,000 users.

The AAP broke away from the IAC with the goal of taking their anti-corruption agenda into the political sphere. The party’s decision to contest the 2013 Delhi assembly elections pitted them in a David-versus-Goliath contest against the ruling Congress party as well as the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), both of whom had decades of political experience and a well-established party structure, cadre and funding to draw upon. Instead of trying desperately to overcome their underdog status, the AAP flipped the script and embraced it enthusiastically. Part of the reason, of course, was sheer necessity—without money, big names or a strong support base among the people, trying to follow a traditional campaign philosophy would be political suicide. The campaign strategy they eventually adopted also demonstrated a great deal of innovative, street-smart thinking.

The AAP party symbol is the perfect illustration of this principle. Every political party has to choose a symbol from a pre-approved list created by the Election Commission. The AAP chose the lowly broom and turned a symbol of domestic drudgery into a potent weapon against corruption, declaring that they would clean up the Augean stables of local government. All party members wore Gandhi-esque caps emblazoned with the words, ‘
Main aam aadmi hoon
’ (I am the common man), reinforcing the Gandhian connect that had initially begun with Anna Hazare. Poll promises were equally populist, including assurances to provide free water and to slash electricity rates.

The entire AAP campaign was largely volunteer-driven, and many of these individuals were well-educated students and professionals who came on board only because they identified so strongly with the party’s anti-corruption agenda. As we’ve said, the middle class tend to largely stay out of the heat and dust of politics, and the fact that these volunteers were hitting the streets of Delhi in large numbers, going door-to-door and urging people to vote for the AAP, certainly created food for thought.

In parallel, the AAP also engaged heavily with social media to recruit volunteers and propagate party ideology. Kejriwal himself took to Twitter and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers in the process, while the AAP’s official website also developed a huge following. Crucially, one could also become a ‘digital volunteer’, helping to spread the AAP’s message online without actually having to knock on doors. A huge number of volunteers were recruited in
this manner, making the AAP’s online strategy extremely successful.
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The AAP also took technology to what has always been a contentious issue in elections—campaign financing. In keeping with their motto of clean governance, the AAP decided to be almost aggressively transparent in their fundraising efforts. They filled their campaign coffers entirely through donations, and claimed that every single rupee donated was logged on the party website. If you navigated to the Donations section on their home page, you could see the names and locations of donors, and the amount they chose to contribute. Even a one-rupee donation was dutifully displayed. When the party reached its campaign total of Rs 200 million, Arvind Kejriwal took to Twitter and other social media, requesting people to stop contributing further. This was a clever strategy on two fronts: it enabled the party to build a treasure chest while simultaneously emphasizing their commitment to transparency.

The AAP managed to pull off an unprecedented victory in the assembly polls, winning twenty-eight out of seventy seats, a performance which left even the most seasoned pollsters thunderstruck. It was the first warning shot across the bows of the Indian political establishment that election campaigns were entering a new era; either you kept up, or you lost.

Twenty-eight seats, however, was not a majority, and the AAP government in Delhi folded after only forty-nine days in power. When they contested the Lok Sabha election later that year, they did not win a single parliamentary seat from Delhi. Clearly, the strategy that had originally carried them into office would need a rethink if the AAP intended to remain a serious contender in the Indian political arena.

With the 2015 Delhi assembly elections around the corner, it was time for introspection to understand why the party had lost its way. Three major reasons emerged: there was a perception that AAP had ‘run away’ from government; some saw its approach as one of perpetual confrontation; and others found it overambitious, wanting to expand at the cost of providing good governance at the local level.

The AAP adopted several new strategies to tackle these perceptions head-on. Firstly, they apologized for resigning from government.
Next, they decided to transform from a party that focused solely on corruption to one that took a more holistic approach towards key political issues. They focused on strengthening the party organization and chose to devote their entire energy only to the Delhi campaign.

Grassroots campaigning had always been the ace up the AAP’s sleeve, and they wisely chose to continue their efforts in this direction. Just as they had previously, they built up a strong volunteer base that spread out across the city, communicating the party’s message; in the last few days before the elections, there was an extra push through a Buzz campaign, which extended to biker rallies, flash mobs, street plays and even a music group, to grab eyeballs. Another way to reach out to the people was through ‘jan sabhas’, where Arvind Kejriwal and other senior leaders would address the gathered crowd.

The AAP continued to innovate when it came to fundraising, whether it was collecting money in bedsheets during the jan sabhas or offering a chance to dine with Arvind Kejriwal for Rs 20,000. Embracing the selfie craze, they came up with a scheme where you could win a chance to pose for a ‘Selfie with Mufflerman’ (a tongue-in-cheek reference to Kejriwal’s ubiquitous winter accessory) for Rs 500.

One of the most striking features of the revamped AAP campaign was its decision to open-source its manifesto. Manifesto creation is usually a closed-door exercise, with limited participation by the people—in fact, this was exactly how the AAP had prepared its manifesto in 2013. This time around, they picked twelve focus areas, including such issues as women’s safety, urban infrastructure and rural development. Each area was then made the topic of a fortnight-long Delhi Dialogue, in which the people’s opinions were solicited. The points gathered from each dialogue became the basis of the seventy-point manifesto the AAP released. As an illustration, when youth empowerment was on the agenda, volunteers first met with student representatives, NGOs and other stakeholders to hash out a list of forty to fifty specific ideas. These ideas were synthesized into five concrete promises that Kejriwal delivered to an audience of 5000 at Jantar Mantar in November 2014. The attendees were invited to provide feedback after the event, either through paper slips or a dedicated
website. All of these inputs were incorporated as well before the final manifesto was readied.
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The AAP’s efforts ultimately paid off in a huge way. The party that had failed to make any impact on the national stage came roaring back, grabbing an astonishing sixty-seven out of the seventy seats in the Delhi assembly. Their success is perhaps best described by a conversation that leading Indian journalist and former editor-in-chief of the
Indian Express
Shekhar Gupta had with a fund manager he met in a hotel elevator.
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Discussing the prospects of various political parties, the fund manager told Gupta, ‘Modern politics has now become like the IT industry. Just as smart tech start-ups keep disrupting established giants, a political start-up has disrupted established, big parties. The big question now, do they understand this? And how will they respond?’

US President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, in 2008 and 2012, are widely acknowledged as having written the blueprint for a new, technology-centred approach to contesting an election, relying heavily on data collection and analysis to power campaign efforts. Journalist Michael Scherer profiled the 2012 campaign for