About the book: Nothing is so emblematic of the idea of democracy as elections. The election machinery is meant to draw power from the people and pump it into our representatives. But what if the machine is not foolproof? And what if that is by design? What if the electoral methods we employ leak our mandates and divert the power to someone else? Electoral figures are numbers. Surely, they can be added, subtracted, and manipulated to achieve the desired result? In fact, this happens routinely in India's first-past-the-post system. Parties with fewer votes may secure more power, and the 'quality' of victory may not always correspond to the number of seats they have won. Numbers also tell us the 'real' rise and decline of parties in elections. We can also measure how competitive or disproportionate elections are in India.

In Who Moved My Vote? Yugank Goyal and Arun Kumar Kaushik dig through the data from India’s national and state election results to show how the system creates leakages in the mandates it returns and why the whole apparatus needs radical reform.

About the speaker: Yugank Goyal teaches public policy at FLAME University in Pune. He is also the director of the Centre for Knowledge Alternatives, which documents district-level statistics and cultures in India. He studied law and economics during his masters and doctoral studies. In addition to psephology, he has written on issues related to law and development, informal markets, and knowledge production. He is passionate about education; recently, he co-founded a school in rural, western UP.

The event is open to all but registration is mandatory.