Evm: Dangers Of Trusting Them Too Much

[ramana]

Pioneer Op-ed, 23 Feb 2010



SOURCE

EDITS | Tuesday, February 23, 2010 | Email | Print |





There’s a Trojan in the EVM!



A Surya Prakash



The debate on the integrity of the electoral process when electronic voting machines are used to cast votes got a fillip recently when a group of concerned citizens organised workshops in New Delhi and Chennai and invited some international experts who have played a part in the abolition of electronic voting in some countries of Europe and in a majority of the States in the US.



Among these experts was Mr Rop Gonggrijp, a computer hacker from the Netherlands who hacked a machine on a live television show and became instrumental in the banning of EVMs in his country; Mr Alex Halderman, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan and an authority on electronic voting security; and, Mr Till Jaeger, the attorney who argued against the use of EVMs before the German Federal Constitutional Court leading to the order banning of these machines in Germany. The Indian viewpoint on the vulnerability of EVMs was offered by Mr Hari Prasad, a noted ‘hactivist’ from Hyderabad, who first raised the red flag about the integrity of the EVM-based election process.



According to Mr Gonggrijp and Mr Halderman, EVMs can be tampered with either at the manufacturing stage or when they are stored in State capitals for deployment in elections or at the polling booths. They are convinced that Indian EVMs are no different from those that were deployed in the Netherlands, Germany or Ireland, before they were discarded in those countries. One of the ways to rig an election is to introduce a Trojan in the display section of the control unit. This chip would give ‘fixed’ results on the EVM screen. In other words, whatever the voters’ preference, the control unit would display numbers as per the hacker’s plan.



Mr Gonggrijp is a prominent campaigner for election transparency and verifiability, and his technical opinion appears to have clinched the issue against electronic voting in Germany as well. “When the vote count happens inside a machine and there is no way in which the result can be cross-checked, the election ceases to be transparent,” he says. The lack of transparency appears to be the Achilles heel of electronic voting. Nobody knows what goes on inside these machines. This is the point on which the German Constitutional Court has held the deployment of EVMs as un-constitutional. It says the Constitution emphasises the public nature of elections and requires all essential steps to be open to public scrutiny.



While all these experts are categorical in their rejection of electronic voting devices, EVMs enjoy a great deal of credibility and public trust in India. This is so because the campaign about the unreliability of these machines is yet to get off the ground. However, politicians of various hues appear to be wary of these machines and have even accused rivals of ‘manipulating’ them, albeit without a shred of evidence to establish mischief.



However, there are those like Mr Hari Prasad who have been demanding that the Election Commission offer opportunities for them to demonstrate the vulnerability of EVMs. The EC initially went along with the idea but developed cold feet and abruptly stopped one such exercise by Mr Prasad and his colleagues last September. Why did the EC back out?



Two other Indians who have plunged into this campaign are Mr Subramanian Swamy, whose petition against EVMs is currently before the Delhi High Court, and Mr GVL Narasimha Rao, election analyst and author of Democracy at Risk — Can We Trust Our Electronic Voting Machines?. This book outlines the story of EVMs in India, Europe and the US, and describes how the non-response of the EC to questions raised by Mr Gonggrijp and Mr Hari Prasad has contributed in no small measure to the growing concern in political parties about the reliability of voting machines.



According to Mr Rao, among those who have raised doubts about EVMs are Mr LK Advani, leader of the BJP, Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad, Union Minister and Congress leader who attributed his party’s defeat in Odisha last year to “manipulation” of EVMs, Mr Prakash Karat, general secretary of the CPI(M), Mr Sharad Yadav, president of the JD(U), Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, president of the SP, Ms Mamata Bannerjee, president of Trinamool Congress, Mr Chandrababu Naidu, leader of the Telugu Desam, Ms Jayalalithaa, leader of the AIADMK, and leaders of the Pattali Makkal Katchi. One look at this list and you realise that there is a doubting Thomas everywhere — in every one of the three known national coalitions and in different regions.



Mr Karat has formally written to the EC. He has said there are several questions in regard to the reliability of EVMs. Among them are: Possibility of incorporating a Trojan in the chip; possibility of manipulation of the chip at the manufacturing stage; lack of EC control over the technical process; and lack of third party inspection. He has said the EC must control the manufacture of EVMs, allow third party inspection and randomly shift EVMs from State to State.



After talking to experts, Mr Rao lists eight situations in which EVMs can be rigged. The EC has sought to counter these arguments by saying that the Indian EVMs are standalone machines which are not part of any network. Therefore, any surmise based on operating system based EVMs would be completely erroneous.



These arguments have been countered by Mr Ulrich Wiesner, a physicist and software engineer, who was the petitioner before the Constitutional Court in Germany. In a statement that is part of the rejoinder affidavit filed by Mr Swamy in the Delhi High Court, Mr Wiesner has said that EVMs in the Netherlands, Germany and Ireland were also standalone machines with no connection to the Internet. He says, “It is common sense that someone who has sufficient access to open the machines and replace the software or hardware can implement virtually any functionality … that would not be spotted by tests.”



The EC is a public body with a fat budget. If it is to command the confidence of all stake-holders in the democratic process, it must function in a transparent manner and answer the questions raised by these citizens and experts. The inflexible and non-transparent attitude of the commission is lending credence to the argument that possibly it has no answers or, worse, it has something to hide.

To me the most intriguing part is all the parties complain of EVM fraud. If so who accomplishes the fraud- the chip maker?