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Anang Mittal demystifies Indian American Voter Atlas
Mittal highlighted the significance of the new database while speaking at the 'Rooted and Roaming' podcast.
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Jeffin T. Kaleekal - Sun, 08, Mar 2026
- 05:39 EDT
- 55
Anang Mittal / The Alliance for Secure AI
Capitol Hill veteran Anang Mittal, the curator of the Indian American Voter Atlas, joined Avatans Kumar and Nirav Patel in the latest episode of their podcast, Rooted and Roaming. Mittal discussed the need for his latest venture aimed at highlighting the Indian American political space and spotlighting their impact in U.S. politics.
Mittal, the man behind the first nonpartisan, open civic data platform, IAVA, utilized publicly available data on Indian-Americans and turned it into a convenient and accessible dashboard for users.
Mittal noted that his tool would help users find out the 'political data and economic power' that Indians hold by understanding "how many of the Indian Americans in those congressional districts are politically energized or politically minded?"
He added that IAVA will also compare the political leanings of the districts.
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Mittal believes that IAVA will be an effective tool in countering hate. He remarked that one can either believe the growing hate that is seen online or use his database to separate fact from fiction.
He noted, "If somebody comes to you who's from the media and says, you know, oh, I've heard these things about Indians, you can point them to this database.. you can go there and you can see the information for yourself rather than having to, you know, wonder what's going on with the Indians in America."
He added, "It was meant as a tool for openness and open societies. And the idea was that if you have more openness, if you have more accountability, that people are able to see the data that's out there, that they will be able to, you know, be better informed, be better voters.
He also pointed out that the database was not static and invited people to come forward with corrections, highlighting that even though it will be predominantly useful for political planners, academics and journalists, common people should also go through the database to better understand the political landscape of the country.
Additionally, Mittal also talked about 'Incident tracker', a new tool he is working on and hopes to integrate with the existing IAVA system. This would track instances of hate crimes against Indian Americans and maintain a holistic database of all such incidents, which can then be sorted and filtered to get a clearer picture.
He added, "the whole point of this is that it's not to, it's not only to, to provide public information, but also as a some level of community warning, some level of community notification, and and kind of those kind of things where people are aware of what's going on in their in their community and in their country."
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