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Is Digital Voting Ready for Local & National Elections?
Recorded: Feb. 25, 2026 Duration: 1:04:48Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. I'm going to go to the next video. I Oh I'm going to go to the next video. Thank you. hello hello all
hello how's it going, Jordy?
Very fine. How are you?
Yeah, doing well. Enjoying my evening.
Fine.
Nice. Just want to check the mic for everyone else.
Stephanie, are you able to accept the invite to speak.
Stephanie, I shared in our group chat how you can enable becoming a speaker. Hey Jackson, glad you can make it.
By default I tend to enable, give everyone the option to become a speaker.
Whether you want to speak or not, it's up to you.
But just making it faster for everyone.
Okay. Stephanie, I also gave you a screenshot on how you can accept speaking as well in our
signal chat.
All loud and clear. Sounding good.
Awesome.
How's it going, guys?
Yeah, doing well.
A little late here, but I imagine potentially the same for you, Jackson.
Yeah, it's 9 o'clock.
Where are you all?
I'm in Singapore, so just across the Straits from you.
Yeah, I'm looking across the Straits right now from Jeffore.
Oh, nice.
Nice. I was just chatting with Cheeky from Jeffler. Oh, nice. Nice.
I was just chatting with Cheeky the other day.
I was saying I've been wanting to go up to Forest City for a while
in general.
Just to see that.
Hey.
Hey.
How's it going?
Was that you?
Yeah, that was me.
Doing good.
Oh, yeah.
Perfect.
All doing well.
Sorry, just a quick check.
Stephanie, is your mic working?
I hope it is.
Can you hear me?
Yep, loud and clear.
Thank you, Anthony, for all your help.
Absolutely.
All right.
Perfect, perfect.
We'll be starting in a moment. I just want Louis to pop back in here.
Yeah, I'm quite excited. We got a range of different voting application protocols
coming in today. I mean, I'll go and introduce a number of them a little bit later, but quite excited about it.
Yeah, Linux is having some technical issues, but that's wide okay.
You know, it just comes with using X,
there's always some technical thing. Okay, well, people are to be filing in and filling in.
I'll just go ahead and kick off.
And then as people join in, we can continue on the conversation.
So thanks for, thank you everyone for joining today.
So this is the second X space that we've been, that we've held on digital voting.
Two weeks ago, we had a conversation on is digital voting ready for DAOs.
It was a very incredible discussion, really useful.
And because it went so well and we had a lot of discussion going on, we wanted to continue on with another one. So for today, we're having a discussion on is digital voting ready for local
and national elections? And it's quite interesting. So back in November, Macy and Shudder released a
state of private voting report, and it included in-depth research on the readiness of privacy
preserving digital voting applications. And as you know, digital voting is something that I'm sure you've heard of
previously. You've probably seen some pilot programs. And what we found from this report
and what we put together was it's really started, it's really matured. Now they offer strong
scalability, audibility, while maintaining valid secrecy, and potentially in ways that are even more transparent
than traditional systems.
And yet, through conversations and research,
we found that despite its benefits,
adoption on national and local levels seems a bit slow.
So one reoccurring theme that we heard was trust,
and not just about trust whether the technology works,
but whether institutions
in the public are ready to rely on it. So for today's discussion we're asking directly is digital
voting ready for national and local elections? So for today we wanted to bring a good variety
of people in here, a good diverse group. So we have people that were into report specifically. So they were the ones that
were designing and implementing these digital voting systems. We have people that were working
closely in different existing election infrastructure. And then we have people
that are focused on more operational and legal and policy risk. But we wanted to get a good variety
of people into the discussion. And so
within the room today, what we're going to be having, we're going to have people from
Bundeswehr University of Munich, which was Stephanie. So very happy to have you today.
We're going to be having someone, we're going to be, sorry, I'm going through my list,
Florian Gatz, a blockchain lawyer, who's going to be joining us today and sharing a little bit more.
Jordi and Farron will be joining a little better from Bakhtoni.
Looks like we're going to have some folks from Boatbase, Payment and Max.
They're going to be coming in as well.
Oren from Enclave.
Alex, Blockful,, AntiCapture.
I heard that the folks from secure internet voting
will not be able to make it, but I'm
sure they can add on to the conversation a little bit
later.
And then Lasha from Freedom Tool as well.
And of course, more people will be popping in as well
and adding their voice.
So it's going to be a really well-rounded discussion today.
So before we begin, what I want to say
is that this is not a panel discussion.
This is not a presentation.
This is an open conversation.
Anybody could speak at any time.
You just raise your hand, react, disagree, spark an idea.
Just don't wait.
Just go ahead and say it.
So as I'm going forward and people are raising their hands, I'm giving them speaker access
so they can jump in at any time.
We really want to have a very agile conversation going on.
So first of all, I'm going to go ahead and kick off with the core question that we have
today, and that is, is digital voting ready for local and national elections
um so i just want to open it up to everyone in the room today who wants to kick off
i can go ahead
uh so very short i think uh with the solutions that we have right now, I think digital voting
is ready for local elections, but not for the national ones.
And there are different points for this statement.
So one of it is the thing about standardization, about IDs and so on.
The second one is the political and the societal will.
And the other one is regarding laws and institutions.
So I think, yeah, ID, public uh collision with with all laws are the things that are are
stopping this kind of of voting to be adopted like more uh more white and especially uh if we talk
about national elections i think we need to provide a set of security guarantees that
provide a set of security guarantees that, yeah, I think we are not yet there.
Jordi, maybe you can share a little bit about your background as well and what you're doing,
just so it gives a little bit more context on where you're speaking from as well.
Yeah, sure. So I'm working at the Bog bogdani project i've been working on the digital
voting realm on blockchain since uh seven years ago and basically what we do at bogdani is to use
web free technology to to bring uh these digital voting tools uh to society so So basically what we call Web2World. So organizations, unions, professional bodies,
municipalities, and at some point, of course, we will want to target national elections.
Cool. Thanks for that. Anybody want to add on? Feel free to jump in, raise your hand, or if you already have speaker access, go ahead and just jump in. We're having a conversation on the main conversation, the topic, which is digital voting ready for national and local elections.
Stephanie, I'm from the university and we are actually studying this topic of how you can adopt blockchain infrastructure to elections.
And we're doing two projects, currently one with the city of Munich, which would be a local election.
And I would say it's close. So it's not so much about the technology question, which I think, and people being deeper into the chat space might be more familiar with this.
We are very, very close.
But on the other side, and Anthony, you mentioned trust.
I think this is one huge aspect that when DAO organizations or blockchain talk about trust and the system being trustless,
and when institutions talk about voters need to have trust in systems,
they are talking about two totally different things.
And this is what I'm working on or we are working on to kind of bridge this gap.
So I would say it's ready,
but there are still some things that need to be done on the legal side.
And for me, also basically connecting these two worlds a little bit more.
Because one side, I mean, the DAO space is very far advanced in having digital elections.
elections. And on the other hand, concerning governance and a lot of the structures, I think
the blockchain world can also learn a lot from institutions, maybe.
I would also like to add on that a little. So I think I have the same opinion as Jordi regarding the standardization and also the legislative base that we are currently facing.
Just for my background a little, I'm Maximilian from VoteBase.
We are also trying to get digitized voting into Germany in different levels.
So similar to your projects, Jory.
And we are facing the standardization issues,
especially with identification.
And hopefully we are gonna face some improvements
with that, with the EU wallet topics, but
also the
big space of technical regulations
from the
governing institutions
is still lacking for the political
digital elections part.
This is currently evolving
in the private elections
sector, but we still need
to have some base work done there
to enable end users to trust
the technological systems in place.
Because in my understanding,
we still have a lot of work to do
to make users of the system
really understand the principles that
makes those solutions secure, which can be assumed for web3 or
DAO users, but for everybody else in web2, this is still an issue.
That's a really good point. I'm actually I'm also on that note, I'm kind of curious to hear a little bit more from the
legal standpoint.
You touched on it very briefly, but I wonder if Florian or anyone else could jump in and
share a little bit from that angle, if there is some risk or some challenges within that
space as well.
Hey, I'm Ferran from Bogdanicu.
I would like to comment something on this.
The issue is not the legal challenges that we may have because the criteria of what is a good uh digital voting process and and what things have to be
minimized what data has to be minimized or preserved and how the process has to be
done and which are the the requirements are like are known and we have some experiences in the
world in which there have been like standards or legislations
working in that sense.
Like for example, in Estonia, it's probably the most successful implementation of digital
voting and they have been like since the 1990s working on this.
So it's not only legal, but also the implementation of the digital
voting ideas and authentication for the citizens.
So they have already more than 50% of people voting with digital voting system in their
national elections.
But I would like to highlight what Ontario is doing in Canada.
In that province, they started by making legal digital voting for First Nations.
They are usually spread in a territory.
Some of them are still semi-nomads, so they need to be able to participate remotely and also
this was extended to municipalities so anyone or any city council in um in ontario wants to elect
their mayor and their their governing team they can do they can choose to do it with digital voting and this has been the case
for more than 50 percent also of the municipalities with some of them only doing digital voting and
eliminating paper valid and this has been an experiment um that with low level or low risk voting and has been evolving.
And now in this year, 2026, they are going to put in practice
the elections with the annual standard in voting. I mean, this is a standard in voting that is just how this digital voting
has to be implemented.
If there's a group of experts that are putting all these requirements and just making them clear for the city councils to follow.
So I think in the legal space there is no problem.
Today I think the problem or the issue or the challenge is to convince the politicians
to make digital voting legal and to push for these standards and these implementations
of the law to happen.
Because what is secure voting is clear.
We know that digital voting is not 100% secure, but we know how to mitigate and how to implement it so
we can just take this standard copy it improve it adapt it to another territory province region
nation and start implementing digital voting doesn't have to be in a national level it can be just as they do in city councils
so so just thinking about that is trust the main barrier then i mean if we wouldn't need to convince politicians and then uh max earlier was talking about uh people need to have an
understanding of it is that sort of like a major barrier that we're kind of up against? We have
the technology. We have some frameworks. Just kind of curious about that. I think-
As a layperson on this call, sorry, I just-
Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Hey. Hey, everyone. My name is Jackson. As a lay person on this call i you know i don't spend too
much time thinking about this subject to be honest uh and as you know an american who in the last few
national elections there's been plenty of discourse about fraudulent elections i would say absolutely
the issue is trust that i can't imagine uh other in the U.S. broadly, at least,
accepting any kind of digital election right now. I mean, we have a huge battle just on mail-in votes.
So I'm actually very curious. Sorry, I didn't catch your name for whoever has the Vukdani handle,
but I didn't know that Estonia did digital voting. I'd be very curious just to hear, like the explain it like I'm five implementation
of how this works.
I, you know, maybe that's out of scope for this conversation, but I'm just curious as
like a, as an Estonian citizen, how do I actually vote digitally?
What are the ways in which that happens?
ways in which that happens.
Um, I'm not an expert on it, but I can, I can explain you by how a
friend that lives there, um, explain it to me.
They basically have a digital certificate on their SIM card on the phone.
So they, every citizen have, uh, their ID already, like kind of like natively, let's say, not natively, but easy to use and ready to use in the phone.
So when they access the website of the government, they can just log in with their digital certificate and just cast their votes.
and just cast their votes.
Of course, this has many implications
and you can argue who is authenticating
and all these things.
There's also the possibility of bribery or coercion.
But this is how they did it.
They first built this layer of authentication
that is one of the major challenges for digital voting.
And then they just use this centralized voting system.
That's pretty cool.
I'm an expert on that.
I can extend and basically explain
how Estonia did implement that.
So just a little comment. I'm a maker of freedomtool.org.
I think like one of, we didn't build out and invent this kind of voting for Scratch, but
we're one of the first to bring the real world identities to this blockchain based voting.
So you could tap a passport or anything that has an NFC chip, like a national ID card,
or anything that has an NFC chip, like a national ID card,
and guarantee that you can't be surveilled,
and this eligibility is proved cryptographically,
and then you can vote without any fear of being surveilled.
The thing is that technically this ability to like prove your eligibility and have this remote
voting architecture is not a moonshot anymore and Estonia is yes I completely agree it's a kind of a
very early example but whatever they've implemented they started this reform in 2005
implemented. They started this reform in 2005. And how they conduct the elections, I would call it
more like an operational guarantees. What does it mean? So they're using a system that looks like a
kind of double-sided envelope, where first part, you encrypt your identity. And because they're
one of the first to implement
this digital identity in different forms, one was this kind of electronic signatures,
another one was that Valkoni mentioned mobile based ID and now they're implementing
this digital ID system, so interchangeably you can use any of them and you can vote using those systems.
But the encryption of who you are, like proving eligibility, is one aspect.
And then the second one in the envelope is like how you vote.
And the procedure that your identity is not associated and kind of like detached from
the vote you have is done procedurally by the National Elections Committee.
So they are the kind of key holders
that encrypts and decrypts the results.
So in a way, there's a lot of trust assumptions,
but taking into consideration
that they were doing this in late 2009 and 10 and have been successfully running this over the
last 15 years, it proves that trust is a very easy thing to be sold. Because in the very first
voting scenarios, only 1% of the population used it, used the Estonian iVoting, as they call it. But
in the latest parliamentary elections in 2023, they crossed the threshold. So more than 51%
of the population just submitted their vote using that method. So in my opinion, the trust as an argument is something a politician would use to not implement or try out any system like this.
Because at the end of the day, technically, yes, remote voting is not a moonshot anymore, especially with the latest cryptographic developments.
especially with the latest cryptographic developments.
Operationally considering the legal aspects.
It's like if a person or like people in power accept that they have to like shift into that,
they have to accept that like system and process problems around like identity devices, audits,
like this resolution, everything that has to
be built.
But I don't think that's a friction in an environment where people are really willing
to implement that.
And the biggest problem is, of course, political.
So the resistance when you touch any government or even like a local level is not like tech is not ready because it will never be ready unless you start.
It's always like power is not ready.
And that's the primary problem because what you're facing here is that you need to understand for the systems today like for the governments
today elections is the kind of control loop there's much more and a lot of stuff gets
decided and distributed than just like counting people's voice and that power structure is something that actually looks kind of similar around the world, different
parts of the world, but dynamics of how to disassemble it or how it should be introduced
in different parts of the world does differ. May I say something?
So on Estonia, if you just reduce it to power,
so I totally believe in or I'm fighting towards having more digital voting,
but it didn't increase, and this is what I find interesting,
the overall participation in voting.
I also find it super interesting that, yeah, in the DAO environment,
you only have one or two percent sometimes voting.
I think why politicians are reluctant is that they are super, super risk averse
and that, unfortunately, the whole legislation or what it's based upon
is very much paper-based.
But just because paper has been there for such a long time, I totally see it coming.
I see it with Estonia and also other countries really solving this identification issue.
And it's definitely going in this direction.
And I think the only way to get there is to basically get the blockchain
or the technology people to work actually with local municipalities
and basically bring these solutions into these worlds.
And I sometimes find it a little bit sad that they are so divided because actually one side
has what the other could need.
And in this bringing it together, I think it would be super, super beneficial.
Yes, but don't you think it looks more like a conspiracy
that one country, Estonia, has been doing it for more than 20 years
and out of all the countries in the world,
there is no other except Russia,
and I'm not going to mention them,
that really implemented the digital voting.
And how that's possible like right like
it looks more like a conspiracy to me than just this individual politicians not being risk averse
i'm i'm personally not so much into conspiracy theories just having seen how government and democratic processes are super, super slow.
Just on the project I'm currently working on, for a small city to do digital elections, like how many people you need to convince, then you have to talk to this ministry.
Then they have to get a permission, but they are not giving it to you because they might interfere with another one like this um
it might be me plus it doesn't help me to see a conspiracy in it i'm just like okay what can i do
about it to make it better or or to change it so i i don't think it's a conspiracy.
I just think these processes are super, super slow.
There are many people who are super risk averse and who are like, oh, we know how this paper thing is going,
so we stick to the paper thing.
I don't want to take this as an apology.
I rather see it for me as an encouragement to kind of like preach
and tell how it could be done differently.
or ask the other way around, if you think
it's a conspiracy theory, what is then
the conclusion you draw from it that we
Yeah, quickly
going to answer. It was just a rhetorical
question, so I don't think there's a conspiracy.
I just think it's just the power dynamics you know the i mean especially the crypto world has seen it right we
we didn't have real digital money for until like twin 2008 and the bitcoin revolution maybe
this entire voting is along the same scenario where you have this kind of power capture and the environment that does not allow such things to pop up and be kind of prioritized.
And that's what I mean on the conspiracy and the friction point.
Or is it maybe just technology adoptions in general being slow?
I mean, you have the same with other mobile banking.
There's still in Germanyany 20 who don't do
mobile banking i don't know how they do banking and they will have a tough time but adoption took
over 15 years so so maybe it's just in general technology adoption being slow and taking time
and you you of course are the early adopter space And then you look at all these leggers and think like, oh, but, but, um, and, and, and
all this said, I want to change it.
I'm really doing my best, but I'm also trying to like, hey, uh, I think it never helps if
we say like, oh, these people and they don't want it and stuff like this, but to try to
understand where are they coming from and, and how, how I, I can change their behavior and I may be trying to see the best in people
or I think where one, just trying to understand where they are coming from
and that they also sometimes see technology as a threat.
And how can I work with this?
And by the way, two super interesting studies from Estonia,
because when you talk about trust, there's a differentiation between trust in technology and trust in institutions. And it's still not clear,
because some people trust in technology, but they distrust institutions. And there are also
other people who trust in institutions and kind of have a mistrust in technology. And in Estonia,
it's apparently 50-50 or there are different studies
came out with different findings so it's it's still an interesting topic to investigate
nice so I think I think I saw Arman put up his hand first and then I can't remember who
else was after but why don't you go ahead hi thank. Thank you very much for this talk.
And I say hello to everybody, especially those in Germany
and Lasha, and everybody else, of course.
Thanks to Lasha, his great team, and a team of scientists
at DistributedLab, Rarimi, Rarimo, and Freedom Tool.
We've created the same technology,
zero knowledge proof for Iranian ID cards.
I reverse engineered the card
to be able to communicate via NFC,
and our friends helped us
working on bringing it on chain and enabling wording.
So that component is now used in a digital direct republic platform
called Jomhur, Persian or Arabic for republic.
What we are doing in this formative phase of Iran
is to establish such a system prior to the transition, intra-transition and
post-transition. So it's a unique opportunity to actually create a country and a political
paradigm for or platform for a country. So I invite everybody to help me on that. But this
is not the only thing I do and my colleagues do. I am German-Iranian and there is a municipal communal election in 2026, September in Göttingen,
Lower Saxony. And we aim for an election community, Wahlgemeinschaft,
and we want to enter with the same platform but for Germany. So one thing might
be a long shot and not possible which is election, legal election, but every other political
function, sociopolitical function, be it deliberation, all sort of polling, voting prior to the official polling could be done using these systems.
We know that the German Ausweis, German ID card, can be used to generate zero-knowledge proof of identity, German-ness, and also age.
We know that more information could be given by the user, but we don't need it.
And we know that that could be used in systems like Agora for clustering of opinion.
We know that we could then have thresholds before we trigger voting, like let's say 5,000 or 5%
of the population of a city say like a plebiscite.
Let's say do this and then we trigger the next round of political or political economical actions, which would be, for example, creating a DAO, creating a budget system, tax system, etc.
So, again, to my German fellows here who do the same things in other cities, please reach out or let me know if you have time.
We can talk about how to do everything, but not the national election or local election, the official election, because that is not allowed per law.
allowed per law and that has to be changed of course but everything else all the social functions
And that has to be changed, of course.
are digitized and using zero knowledge proofs we can actually anonymize users make sure that they
are unique people localize them without giving up a personally identifiable information and do just everything else. And then by everything else,
I give you one example. 14% of adults in Germany do not have the right to vote
in one sort of elections, like be it local or federal or EU level, European Union level.
So we could enable these people by getting their votes and counting that vote in our statistics analysis and go beyond that.
And then represent them by sending one representative that has only one vote, not the last vote.
But collecting the vote of its constituents, their constituents, and representing that, reflecting that.
So a lot of things are possible.
Maybe not in every country you have the same situation.
In a country like Estonia, you have this institutional trust because identity sovereignty has initiated, has been created by the formation of the country.
So basically this country has become Estonia, claimed its identity via the same institutions
that now provide means for digital elections.
So that kind of trust is not possible in every country, but we could potentially create civil society organizations,
all sort of entities that build trust step by step, citizen by citizen.
And in the case of Germany, for example, enabling this voice, unheard voice, one sixth of the adult population,
could be a trust vector that we could actually produce together.
that we could actually produce together.
And then working on this divide,
this political frustration in Germany
that is, I've witnessed seven years of it,
I've witnessed AFD,
which is a tactical voting plus xenophobia plus,
whatever else that is,
a lack of plan growing to one-fourth of,
now one-third maybe of the voting populist so
that is one of the manifestation of having no means to to channelize the frustration
and digital voting in a sense of let's say it shouldn't be, it must not be official, but it could be anything else, which is way more strong, like civil.
Civil society is way stronger than the politics to address this issue.
So I wrap it up. I work on the case of Iran. This is a formative phase.
We have limitations because it's a hostile environment.
We have limitations because it's a hostile environment.
But these limitations help us create a very strong, robust system that creates the democracy, and then build on top of that and basically go for every other city in the world
and create a transnational digital voting system
where ideas easily get refined, categorized, deduplicated, linked,
and then translated and sent to other countries
to reduce the effort that people around the world
have to put into making the world a better place,
the surrounding locality a better place.
Thank you very much for listening.
I really enjoyed it.
I was lucky to just randomly find you talking about this.
Go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for joining and sharing a bit about it,
especially just touching a little about the transnational nature.
I think that's something of another topic we can even go a little bit further on.
Maybe not for the scope of this conversation, but maybe even going and coming in conversation
about how voting could potentially be done outside the sphere of governance within nationals.
Maybe it's something beyond that. But I'll go ahead and pass on the mic. I know Oren, you put your hand down, but if you
want to speak and then Max and then after that, Lewis. Oh yeah, so I can jump in just briefly.
So hey folks, I'm Oren, founder of Enclave. You can look in my bio to dive more into that.
Honorable Enclave.
You can look in my bio to dive more into that.
I just wanted to touch briefly on,
so Lasha and Stephanie both briefly mentioned
digital identity as this component
of obviously voting, digital voting in Estonia and elsewhere.
And I guess I just wanted to highlight there that
trust in digital voting is downstream of trust in digital identity.
We have this registry problem that needs to be solved, essentially creating a digital voting friendly idea and distributing it to the voting populace in any given jurisdiction.
And that challenge is really, really hard.
I mean, many, many governments around the world
are attempting to implement digital ID
or part way through implementing a digital friendly ID.
Most passports have the capacity to be used
in a digital voting scenario like what the
last round of folks building Freedom Tool have done previously.
But there's also a really valid skepticism, I think, from a lot of people.
Sorry, I'm having trouble hearing, Oren.
Is anyone else having difficulty?
Nope.
I hear I'm fine.
I actually hear it with some noise.
Okay, sorry, I cut you off.
I think it's just me.
I apologize.
I admit, yeah, Twitter's a little bit flaky sometimes
on the spaces.
So, yeah, the point there is that some,
I think, very valid skepticism towards digital
identities in a lot of jurisdictions because of the flavor of digital identity that many
governments end up proposing, right? These very kind of centralized panopticon style
centralized panopticon style digital identities that give a huge amount of data and kind of
access control to a very small percentage of people and then when you you couple that with
the additional trust assumptions that you lay on then when you add digital voting to this equation
when you add digital voting to this equation
and the ability to kind of,
to potentially gatekeep or have transparency
into the voting process
and the kind of communication challenge
around the potential mitigations
for both that control
and that insight into how people are voted.
I think it's very justified that there's a great deal
of scepticism both on the identity and registry side
of things as well as on the voting side of things,
and thus it does move very slowly, right?
The slow-moving nature of democratic systems
is a feature rather than a bug, And I, as much as anyone, am frustrated often
at how archaic most of our democratic systems are, right?
Like writing a vote on a piece of paper and putting it in a box
and shaking a box is outrageously archaic,
but it works as well.
And it's stood the test of time in terms of being a system
that provides a reasonable amount of oversight,
a reasonable amount of verifiability in terms
of having a very distributed count.
I'm thinking through the lens of both the US
and the Australian vote counting systems
and not obviously global.
But, yeah, again, I think there's a very legitimate reason
for the scepticism and slow-moving, slow adoption
of both digital identity and digital voting,
as much as I would like to see both rolled out globally
to enable more efficient, more secure voting processes.
Awesome, great points.
So I think Anthony has some technical issues,
but I think let's just hand over to Max, right?
Yes. So just two points to touch upon regarding the political readiness, let's say, for digital elections.
So we spent the past almost five years having talks with politicians on different levels and we experienced
different issues throughout the legislative levels so we have a lot of
municipalities that are willing to participate or at least pilot digital elections but we have
participate or at least pilot digital elections but we have uh let's say uncertainty on those
fronts because they would like to have improvement of upper level government levels and this cascades up to the Bundestag or wherever the responsible people are sitting
and people up in the political ladder, let's say, they are referring downwards and saying
yes, we'll first need to test this in a small space and check what is possible and how this is accepted and what we
need to adapt and both of those issues lead to a really slow progress in the piloting of digital elections in Germany from my perspective.
And also to touch on the ID topic, we in Germany have the electronic ID for a pretty long time, but a big problem in our current system is that even though every citizen by now has one of the electronic ID cards,
almost no use case or a very limited amount of use cases is publicly available to utilize the
electronic functionality. And therefore, a lot of people don't know the pin to use the aid in the correct manner
which then leads to nobody utilizing that functionality we currently have distributed
in all of the wallets across germany i think that's a big one just sort of like
I think that's a big one, just sort of like the technology is there, but then people are
just afraid of using it, kind of in transparency, right?
From my side, maybe just quickly, I'm Luis, I work with Shutter, and Shutter has this
shielded voting, private voting built into Sn built into snapshot which is the biggest
power voting solution i would inspire the amount of spaces and votes um and now we're trying to
bring it together with work base and max and bernie university and others um to the river
i'd say we're in the city of munich um and i wanted to just also touch on this kind of extend on this idea of technology is there, but people aren't really understanding it.
And maybe one more specific point, I think is like this dilemma, I think in voting specifically, there's this dilemma between privacy and verifiability.
verifiability, right? So like, I think that's a big, that's mainly to me, the biggest one
So like, I think that's a big, that's mainly to me, the biggest one.
if you ask an intelligent person, like, why, why aren't you voting digitally, right? Or
why isn't there a digital voting system? I think if you give them a little bit of time
and let them think about it, I think they would say, yeah, so you need to make it transparent.
It needs to be verifiable to everyone, auditable, right? But it also needs to be 100 private right so and i think
just a large amount of population doesn't know that there is this genius kind of like cryptography
magic on all kinds of components right like the zk proofs and the the homomorphic encryption and
amara and threshold threshold key generation like all these
little cryptographic pieces of magic that together kind of enable this right enable this like fully
private yet fully auditable verifiable system which i think that that's something that we need
to um tell people right and like need to explain that that's on on the crypto community to explain that that's enough on on the crypto community to explain that this dilemma at least
kind of like that that that principle dilemma is solved um this is how we solve it right and
these are all the pieces right and then i think we need to tackle all the other there's a lot of
there's a lot of secondary issues right to make it happen and ux and kind of like i think one
other thing is very interesting is like even if you have the ZK proof and you can the voting authority can prove to to the citizens
basically that it that it behaves correctly right and the and the voter can prove to the authorities
that it behaves correctly then the question is like what the hell what is a cryptographic
you know it's proof like to a normal citizen it like, Hmm, I can't do anything with that.
Right.
But that I think can be solved.
I think there's this now we have like coding agents.
Right.
I think it's really exciting to think about, uh, just a very normal, uh, non
technical, uh, citizen voter could use the voting, the coding agent to the zikia proof himself right i think even
that can be solved and we just need to tell people that the technology exists and then we have i
think then we can solve a lot of the sort of like psychological barriers and then we need to be
ready to tackle all the all the secondary issues that the bureaucratic issues and legal issues.
Okay, I think Anthony is still having technical issues. Sorry, Aman, do you want to speak again?
Yeah, sure. Thank you very much. Maybe adding to what you said, technology-wise, election is now ready, is possible.
Possibility from the technology perspective is proven, mathematically proven.
It's tested and we know it's working.
But legally and more importantly, culturally, it is not ready.
So the populace, people should be ready to adopt such a thing.
And trust is one issue.
Political frustration is another issue.
And in general, every country has its own limitations.
every country has its own limitations.
For example, in the case of Germany,
we have a large digitally not so savvy population
who is more or less conservative
when it comes to trying out new things.
So how do we solve this problem?
I would like to briefly talk about
the cultural aspect of digital voting.
Readiness here is a multidimensional field,
and people, culture, and everything below the political level
is way more important, and their adoption, their readiness,
is the biggest factor in adoption of digital democracy and digital voting.
that people need to do in order to first trust in politics
and feeling their effective political agency.
We see that, for example, deliberation could be done digitally
and also verifiably.
I don't know, delegation could be done digitally and so forth.
So what I'm trying to say is one way to make this happen, make this work,
is to start by working on an issue and on processes that are not necessarily elections or voting.
Because voting is just an act. It's just an act of participation.
There are other acts of participation which people do more willingly, and we
don't need to verify them using zero knowledge, using digital ID, et cetera,
yet have their participation secured.
And then build on top of that while the culture evolves and people gain trust and see their agency and their immediate effect on decisions through their representative, be it a vote in a council or choosing an officer somewhere, if they see that this is happening through other
processes other than just like verified voting, digital voting, they gradually grow the trust
which we need on the cultural level to enable all sorts of social civic movements towards
political actions, large political actions like voting. So one way to look at this for us as engineers, strategists, is to fill the gap from one person
to such a large collective act of voting on national level. And then when we break it down
and work on each one of those layers
in the sequence that is meaningful,
then we might have a chance.
So we could talk about it,
like we must talk about a country specific
and region specific.
There are some regions in Germany,
as an example, I can tell you,
that are more pro something new. You see that, for example, I don't want to bring as an example, I can tell you, that are more pro something new.
You see that, for example, I don't want to bring in an example, but there are some states
in Germany that are way more successful at absorbing international talent than the others.
One could be more specific and see who is more willing to change,
which city has more people from, let's say, all around the world
or young people, university students,
and then work on those issues that matter to them
and gradually build on top of that.
And trust is a thing that people see in action.
They want to see this works.
They want to see some people working with it.
Then they will gradually approach it.
But if we say voting right away from the first step, we make it harder for ourselves.
So readiness, yes.
But readiness has other perspectives perspectives other aspects which we need
to work on
100% I think it's a good friend I think I like this point of yeah just using other
non-election forms of kind of community participation governance
participation yeah I think it's a great point and I think just would would
definitely want to show then using those blockchain tools dows and like and if you I think it's not
it's never been as easy as now to let's say like issue NFTs or a certain subgroup of people that
you want to give them to where we just like some easy like sending them links like there's this thing called link drop for example you can
send just a link for them to to get this nfc then and set up a wallet enable them to to have a
digital identity in that way and then you know set a DAO very quickly that can then have all kinds of governance forms and voting forms.
I think it's never even easier to use these tools than how it is today.
So definitely would show for anyone outside of the crypto space as well to use those tools, even if it's not for crypto purposes.
Even if it's not for crypto purposes, right?
Even if it's not for cryptocurrency purposes,
but like to use the available open-source tools
that exist in the people here have been building.
Yeah, for example...
Cool, yeah, thank you.
If I may add one sentence to that.
For example, in order to provide people with tools
to be able to vote,
you need to first convince them to have a digital wallet.
You know, so a digital wallet in form of a crypto wallet is way easier to propagate,
to convince people to use it than right away voting.
You know what I mean?
So this is like one step prior to voting.
How do you raise awareness about that?
And then what issues are so important to certain people
that convince them to use such tools?
Like we need to address those issues first.
So, I mean, readiness is like,
you have to kind of answer people's needs, a specific group of people, and then build on top of that, like a piece of a puzzle, and then like piece them together and create the bigger picture that we want, a national election.
Yeah, great point.
Cool.
Anyone, we have time for one last contribution?
Anyone who wants to talk?
I wanted to be a bit contrarian to that. Overall, I agree that doing these little loops where people participate and using it like non-national level kind of makes sense
as a go-to-market strategy. But on the other hand, like if we look at the practice, right,
whether we take DAOs and the participation or even the statistics of a very generalized polling, right? So in a way statistics show that participation from regular people, it just falls.
Like I was looking like recently at this, I don't know, phone based and street based polls.
And if in like 1980s, you had an average participation in US of 74%. Currently, the general population's participation
in general, like different polls around different issues, it has fallen to 14%.
Maybe it's not only about the tools, maybe the mechanics of how do we mobilize or incentivize these smaller groups is
something broken and we have to rebuild and rethink that aspect as well.
And then polling and voting and identity as a tooling is super easy to implement.
Yeah, I think that's
a fair point as well.
Well, I think, thank you everyone.
So, I think just
some closing words, I think, thank you
everyone for participating. I think it was
a great
mixture of all kinds of
perspectives and ideas.
But I think
I'm personally very optimistic now because yeah we've
seen sort of like the topic being approached from both sides from the
space we've seen we're seeing it being used and we're seeing in the real world
even though there's only other examples I think if you have Munich and in Spain
as well and they are moving forward to adopt it in in the world um and yeah with that
thank you so much i would encourage everyone to check out this set of private voting report
uh from from pse and we contributed as well and and i also really like this idea of the kind of like a transnational techno democracy topic.
So maybe that could be a good place for a next participant like this.
So yeah, really looking forward and hopefully doing this again.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Bye.
Thanks, everyone.
Bye, everyone.
Stay healthy.
Bye-bye.
