Hello and welcome to Ballot Boxes of the World. I am Anjali Raghunathan, and for nine years I ran polling stations and counting centres in Tamil Nadu, so we are going to start this series at home. India's general election involves about a million polling stations, roughly 15 million staff, and a schedule that runs in phases over six weeks. Today we look at why it is phased, how the voting machines are checked and randomised before anyone touches them, and the rule that no voter should be more than 2 kilometres from a polling station, which once sent a polling party on a two day walk for a single voter. I am joined by a former district election officer. We will not talk about who won. We will talk about how it ran. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.