The Path to Digital Democracy #372

Transcript

[Music] hi I'm Sebastian Piro and you're listening to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto Founders Builders and thought leaders on this show we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level and we fly high to understand Visionary Concepts and long-term trends if you like epicenter the best way to to support us is to leave a review on Apple podcast and if you're on a Mac or iOS device the easiest way to do that is to go to Epic center. ro/ apple and if you're new to the podcast be sure to subscribe on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you

listen well it's been a pretty interesting year and as I mentioned last week we're taking a well-deserved break over the holidays but we've got something for you nonetheless so last month just days into the US election the cogx and fabric ventes teams organized talking democracy this was an event that explored how open Technologies and new systems of governance could be a path forward towards a future of democracy I had the privilege to moderate a panel on the future of voting panelists were John Nash who's a fellow at demos an independent Think Tank Santiago Siri president of democracy Earth Dr gatea calu a fellow at the mathematics department at the London School of economics and political sciences and

Professor amarita Dylan who's a professor of Economics at King College London one of the really interesting insights from this panel is this notion that Democratic Technologies are centuries old and the systems of governance around them are slow and perhaps ill adapted to the 21st century if you think of the US Constitution as the operating system for American society considered that that software is over two centuries old the US Constitution was written in the 1700s and that it hasn't received a major verion update since its last Constitutional amendment in 1992 too so first of all there's no way that the considerations and preoccupations of the 18th century perfectly overlap with those of modern times take one example I

think that the time between Election Day and The Time at which elections are certified in December was meant to leave enough time for people to ride on Horseback from the west coast to Washington and much like software if it's left unpatched it can and it will be attacked and I think that perfectly illustrates what's been happening to our democracy in the last two decades and certainly that's accelerated in the last 5 to 10 years by contrast the foundations for many European Democracies are much more recent for instance France and Germany's constitutions were adopted in the last 80 years now maybe that gives them slightly better protections for now but certainly they're not immune to attacks and I think that European Democracies

will be increasingly under pressure in the next few decades so what's the outcome here well I don't know but I think this panel provides avenues for improve improvement with modern voting techniques and things like liquid democracy which we've discussed here on the podcast before certainly this is something that we need to be thinking about and a conversation that we need to have at at a global level if we want our society to continue to flourish so I hope you'll enjoy this conversation and with that I'd like to wish you very happy holidays and a happy New Year hi everybody welcome back to hacking democracy um which is indeed brought to you by fabric ventures in conjunction with with cogex I am Richard mad Fabrics managing partner we're an

investor in this open web open economy space uh it's uh great to welcome you from wherever you're joining us today um and in this next session we're going to reflect on something that I think even the the most lay Observer can note which is that uh counting ballots by hand couldn't be much more uh analog and you know we saw it at the turn of the century in in 2000 um we also saw it did just recently now we got um the question of hanging Chads back in 2000 we' also had now people staring at numbers trying to decipher what had been written but uh or even debating how close observers should be with their binoculars to to observe the actual count itself and with the rest of our lives you know

increasingly uh digitized indeed dependent on digital platforms um surely the voting system is uh rip for some kind of update um so in this next session we're going to explore that and I'm delighted to to welcome Sebastian coutur who um is the host of the epicenter podcast which I must say um has something that has been uh very welcome as my running partner around Hy park now for um many years um and he's going to introduce a panel of uh most esteemed experts and get our liary conversation going I am sure Sebastian you there yes I'm here thanks Richard and uh I'm glad I can make your uh your run more enjoyable so we are here today to talk about about uh well what Richard

was introducing earlier which was this very analog process of counting votes and it does seem quite analog given you the technological innovation uh that has just exploded in the last three or four decades uh I'd like to welcome our our panelists for this conversation uh they are academics activists Engineers uh political scientists and experts in this field we're going to be talking about liquid democracy digital voting and so on um so I'd like to actually get our panelists to introduce themselves so if we could bring them up on the screen and we'll just do a a round of introductions first before we get into this conversation hi everyone I'm John Nash

I'm a fellow at demos we're a independent cross party Think Tank and I work on Democratic Innovation here I'm Santi City I've been um an activist hacker developer trying to figure out how to do digital democracy since 2012 with several pilots and experiments in my back and looking forward to to this discussion in this panel hello everyone I am grandmaa calu and I am a fellow in the Department of Mathematics in the London School of economics and political science um the last three years I have been working on liquid democracy and in blockchain voting hi everyone I'm a professor of Economics at the Kings

College London uh my interest in this topic is uh because I've been working a lot on uh strategic uh voting games so basically applying Game Theory to voting uh I've done a lot of work on um equilibria and so on and my interest here is because I've been working on uh voting and uh Innovations in uh in voting you know systems that you can have with uh with blockchain thanks and of course you are Amita so I'd like to start off by you know right off the bat getting getting sort of an assessment your assessment of what is the state of the democratic process in let's say the G20 countries and which

of these countries are driving innovation in the space of digital voting and the liquid democracy space as a form of more direct suffrage uh for policy making so I'm I can go on that first um so um we have that the vast major majority of democracies there around the world operate through a representative democracy system where every member of the electorate can vote for a candidate to represent them in the parliament Congress Etc so that system was introduced many many years AG ago when it made a complete sense to do that H for example population were too big in

order to have an Agora like assembly where anyone could just turn up um to vote however now we have the rise of the internet and um this system to elect a government seems every year more and more outdated so we have that more and more um Services go online so why voting is still not there so the point recent years I believe that um a kind of direct democracy where everyone can vote on a specific issue becomes more and more popular and Switzerland for example is a a good example for combining some type

of Representative and direct democracy because um I think they they give some votes to to people so some referenda referenda in specific topics to vote on how however for UK I think they have has been coping a bit less well with it combination so we can see that also from the EU referendum Estonia also is a country that um is some type of example in digital voting as they allow citizens to vote online however they also have the backup H process for a paper ballot um election at the same time I I'd like to chime in you know

usually when the discussion goes around introducing technology in an electoral process very rapidly that can go into a discrete where it's technology yes or no like a binary Cho choice and in in reality it's really a spectrum you know how much techn technology and where do we apply technology it's interesting if you look go back in history for instance the origin of IBM in the 19th century as a t tabulating machines company it was created as a company to actually tally the US election uh that back in the 19th century it could take as long as several months to actually count the votes so

IBM was born out of a need to address the scalability of uh figuring out fraudulent votes on a national election if we go closer to our times uh an interesting case is India speaking of G20 countries India is the largest democracy in the world 800 million voters uh it has uh an election that lasts for six weeks uh it takes a long time to count those votes and since H 1994 they actually introduced a an electronic device to put the input of the ballot this is a very simple device closer to a

calculator than to a computer so it reduces the cost of auditing the technology but an interesting fact is that until then on every election in India an average of 200 people died because of the violent events ballots being stolen ballot boxes being burned all kinds of events that happen in a such a big country like India since 94 the deaths occurring on electoral processes have gone to near zero and in last year's election it was the first election in India's history that had more Women Voters than than male voters for the first time in history and that's a consequence of introducing some degree

of Technology into the process and and I think you know we have to to start paying attention to how we can use Civic Tech and blockchain based Tech to improve the the quality of electoral processes and there's a uh there's a great quote by Leo Strauss that comes to mind here he said that political science fiddles while Rome Burns and they're excused by two things they know not that Rome Burns and they know not that they f fiddle and so I'm somewhat less optimistic about the answer to this question in that I see a lot of fiddling Representatives giving citizens say 1% of the budget in participatory budget exercises or remote cantons in Switzerland exercising broad direct

democracy and I would like to see more but I don't think we've quite arrived at a comprehensive answer I think once we once we figure this out then we can start to see movements in this Direction but uh in terms of the state of play today I I it's it's not great I tend to agree with that so uh you know with regard to the question about which countries are at the Forefront of Innovations actually what we see is that uh although there there has been some social science research on how electronic voting can improve outcomes so one is the case of Brazil where an economist Thomas fivar showed that uh that uh you know the the fraud measured by the number of res votes goes down and

health spending on especially for the poor goes up so it had some clear benefits there and in the case of India too there have been studies showing that I mean of course s mentioned the the violence but there have also been studies showing that uh ballot stuffing uh which used to be a big feature of uh elections when they were held at without these electronic voting machines that has gone down tremendously on the other hand in some uh developed countries like the Netherlands uh you know they have actually reverted from electronic voting to paper ballots so so obviously there are deep fears about hacking of these uh of you know of electronic voting so I think one of the big questions is how we can ensure that voters trust the the

system of electronic voting thank you for those answers and uh I'm kind of comforted to see that there's uh sort of both sides here one that's perhaps more optimistic and one that uh sees things perhaps the more pessimistic like but uh but that'll make for I think for good debate in this conversation so during this this answer was mentioned the uh some of the benefits of of electronic voting uh one was you know the reduction of uh batt stuffing voter fraud uh obviously more access to underprivileged populations Etc um I believe in India you know these electronic voting machines are even you know carried into the forest and into the you know the Deep yeah the Deep forests of India to uh to deliver them to people so that every single

participant can vote which is right but looking more at the broad benefits of um direct digital voting and just you know to a broad extent liquid democracy what are the incentives here for the different stakeholders in democracy that is individuals you know voters but also governments and you know to a third uh extent corporations that also participate in our in our democracy to some extent in in my personal experience when when I did activism back in Argentina along with some colleagues and friends we did a political party and we tried to change the system from within my conclusion after several years of

political activism in Latin America is that if you want to be successful in the system it's it's more likely that you you will end up being changed by the system first you will end up becoming yourself an efficient player of a system that tries to persist and and and be preserved throughout the decade and throughout the centuries My Philosophy today it's a personal take is that we rather figured out how to build a new model that makes the existing model Obsolete and in that regard the rise of blockchain networks or or or trust networks that allow for the creation of new kinds of entities for instance the creation of distributed autonomous organizations or you know entities that are operating cyberspace you know that

do not rely on any traditional jurisdiction and execute their decisions by means of smart contracts it's an entirely new canvas to explore uh governance and what governance is in the 21st century that does not need to ask for any kind of special permission and it's just takes a new generation to start piloting and trying and experimenting with this new technology and that can work for public goods and for private entities as well yeah I see I see several uh good features of a system like uh liquid democracy for example in where in referenda which U gmaa mentioned for Switzerland there are referenda where you know for example in

like the there is the There Was the brexit vote there are various um you know policies that the government would would might might want to take on uh how to control Corona virus and you know in all of these I think that the the role of uh being able to delegate votes to people that you think know more than you uh that should be a good feature of liquid democracy this is something that I've worked a bit on and uh you know what we show mathematically is that actually the the information aggreg it is possible to construct mechanisms of liquid democracy so that information is better aggregated uh in large elections I would like also to mention here that um thanks Sago for sharing your experience with um trying trying to

change the system from within and I would like here to say that they are more and more H people in Academia that they are getting into the exploring the liquid democracy Mech mechanisms so I believe that will be very helpful and it's going to have some good results that we can rely on later of how we can move something like that into practice I also believe that one of the um main ways to do something like that is is a blockchain technology so and this technology could potentially move politics into the 21st century and there are many projects um and teams that they

are looking into that of how you can create a secure and trusted online voting systems and that's mostly to create the trust for the public to trust the online voting systems as I said using this technology yeah could help us um Implement some type of liquid democracy and that should also allow the political system to be more fluid and hopefully quicker to react to influential people that might U act maliciously because we might not have to stay with representatives for four or five years and um of course there are at the moment there are some examples of a

companies of projects that they use or they have done some experiments on liquid democracy without using um blockchain technology for example there was an experiment on running liquid democracy in Google however um in that um cases you have to trust the election um Authority behind that so the company in that context but using the blockchain technology the election running could be just distributed to various stakeholders including the the whole electorate themselves so this is a question that we come up we come we come out sideways or

from a different perspective so we at demos we've got a big paper that's publishing tomorrow proposing a concept called combined Choice a way of thinking about Democratic decision making that argues that throughout history at least the last 30 years digital the digital Revolution digital technologies have had a fundamental effect where they've on sectors from whether it's Finance to music whatever it is and so when we think of digital voting that always feels like a fairly superficial cosmetic change when the more interesting question is what's the fundamental change and so the argument that that that we we make in this paper is that we need to move away from a system that looks at laws and and decisions

individually incrementally right this is a byproduct of sort of 900 year old system of putting forward a proposal and making a yes or no decision and to look more holistically at the law so while someone like Lawrence leig argued that we should think of code AS law for the way that it structures Society our argument is the other way around that we should think of law as code now not write it as code or make it machine readable but think of it as the nation's operating system and so the proposal we're putting forward continues that logic out and says if we take all of the rules that structure society and we bundle them together in one place then change suggestions of change ideas can be put forward as an alternative version

of that bundle rather than as an incremental yes or no decision and our group of decision makers whether they're every whether it's every citizen or or a smaller group can choose the bundle of stuff they want and the one with the most support is adopted and this is something we're putting into practice with a housing estate in East London and will we hope soon be used in in in Birmingham to make various local level decisions and so in relation to this debate the point isn't to say how can we use technology to do this one surface level thing within our system system but how can these digital Technologies change the way the system works and that's what's always happened and so we're we're confident that that approaching it in that fundamental way will produce surprising and unusual results I like this idea of of looking

at democracy as a technology stack and you know there are different components in that stack and you may upgrade one component like you may upgrade the kernel on your operating on your system right or you might upgrade certain software and you know voting is definitely one of the components in that in that broader stack uh one of the things that was brought up you know during this last segment was the idea of trust and that digital voting systems need to be trusted by the greater population and perhaps they have suffered uh from lack of trust and in case in fact this was probably the case in in the Netherlands as was pointed out like what are some of the good good standards or good normative properties uh for liquid democracy systems and perhaps what are some ways in which

technologists uh but also does broadly those who are promoting uh these systems can help essentially the trust behind them there's a um well-known paper sadly I I will Google it right after my intervention here and and and try to remember it but there there's a paper that tries to address the problem of voting systems coming from Strictly from an information theoretic perspective and ultimately like the desirable system for any electoral game is you want a system where you have guaranteed vote secrecy you want the privacy of the vote to be an element that so you prevent the coercion of the consciousness of the

voter and the voter can vote freely then you have to guarantee the Integrity of the vote uh meaning that from emission to tallying you know you have the guarantees that the vote will be the the vote that the voter exactly wanted to to to vote that there's no middle or attack in the middle that will try to change that vote so Integrity is very important and lastly uh the element of verifiability allowing for the voter to effectively verify that his or her vote has been counted the right way and then the T meets the number of Voters and so on so secrecy integrity and verifiability are three Key properties

for any electoral system but when you analyze it from a strictly information theoretic lens and and looking at the problem from a mathematical theoretical standpoint not from Real World challenges the paper comes to the conclusion that is very hard to reach all three that you end up having some kind of trilemma where there have to be concessions you might want to you can have a private secret vote but then guaranteeing the ver verifiability is not that easy or you know there's only two out of three that you can that you can gather so it's it's a it's a very complex problem it back also to Arrow's famous paper on on the challenges of elaborating a perfect democratic system at least from a mathematical standpoint

where we have to deal with this the Grim reality that the perfect voting system might not exist yeah to and to that I can add uh some other requirements of of such a system one is uh you know we were discussing the blockchain earlier so one one important feature to ensure trust in the system would be to think very carefully about uh who who are going to be the stakeholders so you have mostly in in in uh you know national elections you would have uh an election Authority so if you have instead if you have this blockchainbased electronic voting system who are going to be the stakeholders who will control uh who will control the the code and everything else so uh so

ideally you know people from different parties who have opposing interest should be should be the stakeholders so that's an important question and the the the other question that I would I mean the other problem I would add is from a social science point of view is that of vot buying which becomes much easier with uh with electronic voting and I think Santi did mention that to some extent that uh the secrecy of the V or to prevent cision of Voters how do you do that in these systems and this is where economics and social science can contribute in the design of such uh systems I just found the paper is called an information theoretic model of voting systems want to go it some of good properties of a liquid democracy is that um okay it combines

the advantages of a representative and direct democracy and in theory can could also increase participation for example those people that abstain um because let's say that they don't know what to vote for in continuous referenda then they might have the option to choose the person that they trust and that could also happen for different topics so more knowledgeable people can influence the final outcome however if the trust is broken then citizens could um deviate um faster than what we currently have um their vote to some to some others also

about um we might have also the issue of a vote buying but I believe that that also could be an i mechanism and and design problem for example we know currently that there exist some um blockchains that they are Anonymous blockchain so for example you don't if you have a transaction let's say of votes towards um your um I don't know favorite um trustee um then um the person that will receive the votes might not be able to see where these votes come from so maybe something like that could also solve any potential vote buying problem but that also again it

depends on the application the voting applications that you want you might have other voting applications for example in the corporate um H system that um vote buying for example between shareholders um is acceptable when it comes to this this question of liquid democracy and I'd be interested to hear what Santiago has to say about this as he's looked at this probably closer than we have but when we looked at this structure the big problem that we found came when you try and divide things into different areas so is something a health question is it an education question is it a finance question is it a budget question often it's all of those things and then of

course the complexity that emerges as you're delegating uh delegating and delegating and delegating and so we came to the conclusion that liquid democracy isn't a good idea and that wonder what my panelists May disagree but and then in the sort of same exercise we looked at a lot of blockchainbased ideas and one thing that struck us was that there is an inherent distribution to a democracy right you're you're asking lots of citizens and so rather than involve sort of distributed ledgers uh distributed computation a currency an exchange all these kind of things we came to the position that the best form of distribution we could have in a democracy is is a situation where the decisions of each person are held in

different locations and then aggregated to reveal their preferences whether that passes Santiago's three tests I'm not sure I think that's perhaps impossible but um that that that's our view so I'm on the other side of the fence when it comes to liquid democracy it's a fascinating topic I think that we're one interesting thing about electronic technology is that it it gives us a new canas to advance the game theory on how voting systems work and we no longer have to be limited to strictly first P the post voting and people raising hands and that's it we can go many many steps further and and probably since the rise of the smart contract economy and where there are a

lot of governance experiments happening we are starting to see how these experiments play out there are several ideas we have at democracy Earth experimented with many of these uh we have tried liquid democracy in the past we have seen democracy liquid democracies in being implemented in some other protocols usually there's a nice case that I always quote that is called as a blockchain project called Lisk and you have the ability to do what it's called delegated proof of stake it's not exactly democracy because there's no way of formalizing human identity on blockchains yet but people were voting directly with their tokens or delegating tokens to other participants and the community ended up having two large

parties rep Republicans and Democrats all over again competing for the decision-mak process and this is actually a pattern that happens in a lot of token voting schemes on ethereum today for instance where if you look at Unis swap for for example it has two addresses each holding 32% of the tokens which means they have two-thirds of the voting power in the protocol which means that whenever someone goes to a decision in the unisa protocol uh the only decision Mak are those two whales rendering the whole voting process irrelevant because what whales usually do is they just see how everyone is voting on a decision and at the last

minute or the last block of the blockchain they just tumble the election according to their own personal interests so um until we don't get a way of formalizing human identity over decentralized networks in a way that is privacy preserving so we don't recreate Facebook or the Chinese Communist party which are essentially the same thing uh we we we still have a very open problem about how to achieve digital democracy in these networks um from the game theoretic point of view uh we have been exploring ER several ideas an interesting approach we like a lot that gave us good results in Colorado in the United States where we did a big pilot was a quadratic voting which is a system

where it captures not only the preference of the voters but also the intensity of those preferences as the cost for giving your vote to an idea increases quadratically rather than linearly and that pushes the voter to decide whether he or she will support uh with all of his voting power uh a minoritarian idea or with a weak voting power several ideas and every election in the world is really a challenge of that the weak preferences of the majority versus the strong preferences of the minority and uh being able to capture that with novel game theory is really interesting

but at the same time is very important in democracy that every player understands the rules so um we still have a long way to go I think that I me that's a great point and I think it points to to something which uh we were talking about before uh this started and I I kind of chimed into the previous uh talk and and I I just came in when vene gupto was saying that we need to demort divorce democracy from the current governmental framework and I wonder to what extent you know liquor democracy and the things that we're discussing here and that we're talking about here in this panel are framed in the context of what we know and understand as what a democracy does and should look like I wonder if you know this current framework perhaps uh needs

to evolve and you know isn't is no longer adapted to you know our current to our current reality to what extent does do you think that you know democracy itself you know needs an upgrade at every you know point in the stack including this idea of you know one vot one person one vote one example which was mentioned in the previous panel was you know statistical uh models to determine people's interests and broader Trends in society what are your thoughts on some of these ideas as democracy certainly to evolve I I like seeing these ideas sort of battle it out and I think we have to be quite blunt when we're comparing them and and testing them and looking at them the

thing that I'm most excited about is this idea of a sort of two-sided Network or two-sided Market where instead of having to go down the quadratic rout or instead of having to randomly select citizens you've got a group in which people are free to choose the thing they want but they're also free to propose Alternatives this is kind of how the free market works and it produces great results because if you don't like what you see you can put forward something else so the freedom to choose tells us which is best and the freedom to propose increases the the the quality of available options and so I think rather than comp making democracy more complex for Citizens asking them to do more we can ask them to do less but add that second side and increase the sort of

improve the quality of what's being decided there's a a famous president from uai very loved by everyone in Latin America except by ugan as usually happens with politicians no one is a preacher in their Homeland called Pepe Mika once told me one day I had was able to meet him in Washington I asked him well what's what kind of advice would you give to a a democracy activist and he said you're gonna get tired a lot because it's a never-ending process democracy is always a working process if it if democracy was a absolute idea a totalitarian idea it would be a pretty much a a fascist model of the world like

every other ideology that is out there that gives you a complete idea of the world democracy is the one exception it's the system about how we make decisions and not necessarily about a conclusion about how the world should work out so it's it's it's always GNA be a a frustrating process because H it's it's a process that should have first and foremost the goal of including everyone in the in a decision making process and that takes education that takes technology that takes a lot of tools and I guess it's it's an ongoing evolutionary process the good thing is that every government in the world claims to be a democracy North Korea is

called Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the Chinese Constitution it says like the second paragraph China is a democratic dictatorship whatever that means so it's interesting that it's an idea that subversive that can penetrate every government in the world uh yet everyone has very different ideas of what it means yeah I I see that this you know the the evolving of of De the evolution of democracy and uh technology it's it's a huge challenge because the incentives of politicians uh to implement any of these new systems which might uh distribute power more equally among people uh is going to be resisted it

seems a lot so even if we think you know ideally the the blockchain might solve the problems of secure electronic voting or that liquid democracy is much better in this complex world where you know you need uh you need the experts to make decisions so liquid democracy might be ideally very useful but it's probably going to be resisted a lot and so I don't know what the projection is what what you know what we can expect in terms of implementation of any of these Technologies so what I have PL in and all these nice comments that I totally agree with is that um yeah some type of liquid democracy could maybe start from um smaller scales so for example some

trials or from local authorities as um John mentioned before and from um from the bottom to the top so I think that should probably have some type of effect in order to to make more people come together for the decision making um as well for their everyday life yeah I my my fear here my concern I'd say is that there there is very little incentive for politicians to to implement new Innovations in the democratic system and the rate at which technology is advancing and the rate at which largely corporations are benefiting from that speed uh of of

evolution of in technology that democracy starts to lose its its power in the sort of more Global Order of things and that we see you know power falling into the hands of non-elected Corporations and to some extent this is what we've started to observe you know I want to come just as we start to come towards the end of our conversation here you know bring it to back to the the recent us election one of the things that stood out to me as I was following this was the extent to which people seem to be so incredibly attached to the Democratic process and the framework for the US Democratic process or the the US Constitution it all it seems almost

Sanctified right that this document that was written two and a half three centuries ago still is upheld in in some sanctimonious uh fashion this is the case you know here in France for example as well the Constitution isn't nearly that old here but obviously that has its flaws the world has changed since then and you know I feel that there's a reluctancy to replace the systems that are already in place and have systems that are more adapted to a modern society you know why are some signs that we might observe that things could change in the future or you know are we headed towards a more Bleak outcome uh where we perhaps you go more towards

conflict than um more just uh democratic system I had a conversation recently with a China anal and we were sort of semi joking that there seems to be these two options between a highly efficient authoritarian regime or a highly inefficient Democratic regime that's like I it doesn't totally fall into those categories but that seems to be the kind of the dichotomy and so I would say that the the big challenge the big exercise is to create the efficient democracy and that and that is the nuts and bolts it is the system it is the processes and demonstrating something that works so much better than the system we've got in whatever use case that that uh that it it starts to spread

that those are my two sents every American election to me is an interesting case study on how to exploit democracy in one way or another whether it was Cambridge analytica four years ago or mailing ballots on this year's election the the one thing that we do know is that we usually go to a vote when it's a hard difficult conflicting decision we don't go for a vote for easy choices or easy decisions so by definition uh democracies have to thrive in very hostile environments and hostile environments means that there will be players willing to cheat H willing to corrupt willing to take over

the election whatever it takes so the systems that we build have to be extremely resilient H to be able to survive these kind of hostile actors um and the reason we go to democracies is because the higher the risk in a decision the higher the need for legitimacy in the decision-making process that's why we choose the root of democracy to to address the the need for legitimacy in a very conflicting environment democracies are not meant to to rule over easy easy decisions or simple decisions so in that regard I think we we will keep seeing exploits over democracies every four years years or every two years around the world as technology also plays an important role

in manipulating and and setting the agenda and and I know from experience on every pilot we have done in democracy Earth we had attempts from hacker hacking from coming from governments coming from activists coming from insiders of an organization if the decision is important there will be experts yeah I think I I am also quite pessimistic about the adoption of uh you know good Democratic uh practices or changing the current system as I said before I think I'm quite cynical about politicians wanting to give up their power uh but looking at you know uh how change happens might be a good way to go so looking across countries to see which

ones have adopted better systems and how they did it might be one way to to to to research on this and and what you notice also is is the large number of protests that are going on from from ordinary people across the world and one question that you know that is really standing out for me is when when do such protests succeed and if they do succeed then I think that gives us a hint about what conditions are needed in order to change Democratic processes and the one more challenge I can see in all this um evolution of democracies that um um it is a topic that involves many different disciplines so so it's not only computer science

mathematicians economists social scientists lawyers and activists so it requires the effort of um all these disciplines together so but the good thing is that at least in Academia there is some new trend for interdisciplinary multidisciplinary research that I believe that um could deal with this at least with this challenge as well but there is a lot of lot of way to go one one of the things that stood out for me here Santiago is the parallels between you know your statements about the attacks on democracy and you know software and if you think of you know the US democracy as software which was written 300 years ago and the last

update happened in 1992 with the 27th Amendment well no wonder it's getting attacked with like these very modern exploits right that exist in our current reality is it safe to say that democracy that don't up update at a Quicken up pace right that that don't apply the software patches are due are bound to uh to be exploited and um yeah and whatever consequences that has to me the most Salient fact of the week of the American election and of these last couple of weeks is that the rise of the price of Bitcoin and crypto in general is going significantly up in a very fast pace and that's the strenous

effect of people exiting a system and engaging in something else would you be you're being quite generous in referring to it as old software in the UK we still write laws on bits of dried animal skin and so I think question isn't how we vote but what we're voting for and so I would encourage a bigger framing of the issue any last words uh before we close up here I I know we we've been a bit pessimistic but I I choose not to surrender you know it's a it's going a b to be a battle of generations and the more we keep fighting eventually the better things we get and and I think uh it's an exciting

time to be working on technology around this there's tremendous potential tremendous creativity being applied to this and um I I I recover my optimism when I meet young hackers around the world building on ethereum with Bitcoin and on this new network that are ding to create a new institutional reality for the world Marita any final thoughts no I think the the US election um you know demonstrated to us um how similar the US is to you know countries like India I mean we have or or even Africa you know we have like you know coups going on and uh very similar sorts of problems which

we were really you know really shocked to see that uh the us could have the these issues of trust in in elections as uh developing countries have so uh in indeed you know uh many of my my uh friends have mentioned how India could actually help the US by providing them these electronic voting machines to help them next time so I think maybe there is this convergence happening in politics if not in economics thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find And subscribe to the show on it iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of

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