During the 1990s and early 2000s, election credibility was so low that political parties routinely rejected results. The country needed a reset. In 2006, the Bangladesh Election Commission (EC), with technical help from the German development agency GIZ and funding from the UN Development Programme, began a Herculean task: photographing and fingerprinting every adult citizen.

But behind this simple card lies a fascinating, messy, and deeply ambitious story of data, democracy, and digital surveillance. Before 2006, proving you were Bangladeshi was a bureaucratic nightmare. The country relied on a hodgepodge of handwritten voter lists, manually stamped birth certificates, and "certificates of character" from local ward commissioners. Fraud was rampant. The system allowed for two dangerous phenomena: "ghost voters" (fake names on electoral rolls) and "voting tigers" (one person voting multiple times in different booths).

For better or worse, in Bangladesh today, you are not a citizen because you were born there. You are a citizen because the NID database says so. And when that database glitches, for a moment, you cease to exist.