05-30-2009, 03:26 PM
Ravish does not know that the Indians react slowly but decisively. It is always an upheaval.
Whatever he can say as devil's advocate, there is nothing extraordinary that the Congressmen achieved to be reelected to a second term under MMSingh. Vajpayee's five year term in comparison was a golden era and yet he lost the reelection because of what he didn't do for the Hindus.
There are lot of pointers to this election being rigged and bought. The Sonia's mafiaso are the most corrupt people on earth. There is concerted effort to portray them as angels using this rigged election. The people have been in shock at the results. Wait until they rise. The Congressmen will then know how much of their 'voters' support is with them when they confront them on the street.
And anyone who thinks that the mafiaso will respect real democracy and not indulge in rigging to protect their ill-gotton wealth is a fool.
Anyone who thinks that the 'election' has settled the matter is naive. The BJP or any other opposition has not committed any grave sin to be shown the door to oblivion. There is bound to be a leadership change and the people's anger will be properly directed and the defrauders will be consigned to where they belong.
Here is Dr. Subramanian Swamy's letter to the Secretary to the Election Commission and his press statement on this issue.
The Secretary May 29, 2009
Election Commission of India
Ashoka Road,
New Delhi 110001
Re: Demand for an absolute requirement of a paper trail to substantiate and verify the election results as obtained from the EVMs presently being used by the Election Commission
Dear Sir:
As you are well aware, for several years now it has been widely felt that it is possible to manipulate the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMâs) presently being used by the Election Commission of India. In the US and Europe, necessary modifications and safeguarding of the integrity of the EVMs are currently under intense discussion [seewww.verifiedvoting.org].
In or around late 1999, I myself had arranged before the then three Election Commissioners, a presentation in this behalf by Professor E.S.Sarma of the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A, and Dr. Gitanjali Swamy .Professor Sarma is an acknowledged expert in the field of artificial intelligence and holds a patent for the software for RFID; and Dr. Gitanjali Swamyâs doctoral dissertation, from the University of California at Berkeley was precisely on this subject of verification i.e. how to ensure that machines are actually doing the work they were intended to do. They demonstrated to the satisfaction of the then Chief Election Commissioner, Mr. M.S. Gill, that it was very possible for some one or more of the various persons having access to the EVMâ s at different points of time, to plant a software program, that would have the effect of producing an election result in favor of a particular candidate/ political party. However, at the time, Mr. Gill had opined that such a collusion would require the cooperation of too many persons and therefore would leak out; and hence he felt it was quite unfeasible in practice. Even then, I had demanded then that some sort of a paper trail should always be maintained, so that in case of dispute or material doubt (such as, for example, has arisen recently in the 2009 General Elections, in the Sivaganga [Tamil Nadu] Lok Sabha constituency), this paper trail would be available to substantiate/ repudiate the results as declared by the EVMâs. But this was not done.
Since then, in the last decade, public realization of the above drawbacks, has become widespread internationally. In October 2006 the Netherlands banned all EVMâs. In March 2009,after hearings that stretched over almost two years, the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic of Germany ruled that voting through EVMâs was unconstitutional. In 2007, after conducting a top-to-bottom review of many of the voting systems certified for use in California, its Secretary of State strengthened the security requirements and use conditions ,requiring all EVMâs to have paper backups. Thereafter, till today a further 27 states of the US have followed suit.
Large numbers of Indian voters too, have lost faith in the results of voting as reflected in the EVMâs. Writ Petitions challenging these results have been filed this May in the High Courts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala; but significantly the Election Commission has so far failed to take steps in regard even to a representation to the Commission arising from an earlier PIL filed in 2004 in the Supreme Court of India by Dr. Satinath Choudhary.
Therefore ,by this Notice, I call upon the Election Commission of India, as a first step, in the process of ensuring that the results of elections conducted by it, are not hijacked by manipulation in the EVMâs , to provide for a paper backup to all EVMâs, as set out hereinbelow :
âOnce approved, the voter views the ballot and makes the desired selections â¦..If the voter confirms that the choices displayed are correct ,the machine records the vote on some storage medium such as a CD-ROM or flash memory and overwrites the smart card with random numbers to prevent its reuse â¦â¦.The voting machine then prints out a human readable ballot ,which is confirmed by the voter, who then deposits it in the ballot box , which poll workers are monitoring. If the election is later disputed, officials can optically scan these paper ballots or hand-count them.â(See May 2009 issue of the IEEE Computer Society, pages 23 to 29, Article by Nathanael Paul and Andrew S. Tannenbaum:âTrustworthy Voting: From Machine to Systemâ).
Furthermore the result as so tabulated by the EVMâs should ,in the first instance, be regarded only as a preliminary result; and in case of dispute, it is the manually tabulated count based on the paper trail which must be the final result.
I would be grateful for an early and favorable response to my above demand, failing which it will be necessary to approach the courts for relief.
Yours Sincerely
Subramanian Swamy
=============================================
<b> <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'> Are EVMs Safe? </b></span>
Subramanian Swamy
(fmr. Union Law Minister)
There is much talk today about the possibility of rigging of electoral outcomes in the recent General Elections to the Lok Sabha. These doubts have arisen from the unexpected number of seats won by the Congress nation-wide, and which doubts are accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals as also in the popular international press which raise doubts about the EVMs.
For example, the respected International Electrical & Electronics Engineering Journal (The IEEE, May 2009, p.23) has published an article by two eminent Professors of Computer Science, titled: âTrustworthy Votingâ in which they conclude that while electronic voting machines offer a myriad of benefits, these cannot be reaped unless nine suggested safeguards are put in place for the protecting the integrity of the outcomes. None of these nine safeguards are in place in Indian EVMs.Electronic voting machines in India today do not meet the standard of national integrity and safeguard the sanctity of democracy.
Newsweek magazine issue (dated June 1, 2009) has published an article by Evgeny Morozo, who points out that when Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme in 2006, such as fancy touch-screen voting machines, it was widely welcomed: Three years and Euro 51 million later, in April, the government scrapped the entire initiative. What doomed the effort was a lack of trust: the electorate just didnât like that the machines would record their votes as mere electronic blips, with no tangible record.
Morozov points out that one doesnât have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the fallibility of electronic voting machines. As most PC users know by now, computers can be hacked. We are not unwilling to accept this security risk in banking, shopping and e-mailing since the fraud is at the micro-level, and of individual consequence which in most cases is rectifiable. But the ballot box needs to be perfectly safeguarded because of the monumental consequence of a rigged or faulty vote recording. It is of macro significance much like an âe-coup dâetatâ. At least thatâs what voters across Europe seem to have said loud and clear.
Thus, a backlash against e-voting is brewing all over the European continent. After almost two years of deliberations, Germanyâs Supreme Court ruled last March that e-voting was unconstitutional because the average citizen could not be expected to understand the exact steps involved in the recording and tallying of votes. Political scientist Ulrich Wiesner, a physicist who filed the initial lawsuit said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that the Dutch Nedap machines used in Germany are even less secure than mobile phones! The Dutch public-interest group Wij Vertrouwen Stemcomputers Niet (We Do Not Trust Voting Machines) produced a video showing how quickly the Nedap machines could be hacked without voters or election officials being aware (the answer: in five minutes!). After the clip was broadcast on national television in October 2006, the Netherlands banned all electronic voting machines.
Numerous electronic-voting inconsistencies in developing countries, where governments are often all too eager to manipulate votes, have only added to the controversy. After Hugo Chavez won the 2004 election in Venezuela, it came out that the government owned 28 percent of Bizta, the company that manufactured the voting machines. On the eve of the 2009 elections in India, I had in a press conference in Chennai raised the issue and pointed out that those who had been convicted in the US for hacking of bank accounts on the internet and credit cards had been recruited just before the elections. In the US, the Secretary of State of California has now set up a full-fledged inquiry into EVMs, after staying all further use.
Why are the EVMs so vulnerable? Each step in the life cycle of a voting machine â from the time it is developed and installed to when the votes are recorded and the data transferred to a central repository for tallying â involves different people gaining access to the machines, often installing new software. It wouldnât be hard for, say, an election official to paint a parallel programme under another password, on one or many voting machines that would ensure one outcome or another pre-determined even before voters arrived at the poll stations. .
These dangers have been known to the Election Commission since 2000, when Dr,.M.S. Gill, the then CEC, had arranged at my initiative for Professor Sanjay Sarma of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Gitanjali Swamy of Harvard to demonstrate how unsafeguarded the chips in EVMs were. Some changes in procedures were made subsequently by the EC, but not on the fundamental flaws that make it compliant to hacking. In 2004, the Supreme Court First Bench, of Chief Justice V.N. Khare, Justices Babu and Kapadia had directed the Election Commission to consider the technical flaws in EVMs put forward by Prof. Satinath Choudhary a US based software engineer in PIL. But the EC has failed to consider his representation.
There are many ways to prevent EVM fraud. One way to reduce the risk of fraud is to have machines print a paper record of each vote, which voters could then deposit into a conventional ballot box. While this procedure would ensure that each vote can be verified, using paper ballots defeats the purpose of electronic voting in the first place. Using two machines produced by different manufacturers would decrease the risk of a security compromise, but wouldnât eliminate it.
A better way, it is argued in the above cited IEEE article, is to expose the software behind electronic voting machines to public scrutiny. The root problem of popular electronic machines is that the computer programs that run them are usually closely held trade secrets (it doesnât help that the software often runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is not the worldâs most secure). Having the software closely examined and tested by experts not affiliated with the company would make it easier to close technical loopholes that hackers can exploit. Experience with Web servers has shown that opening software to public scrutiny can uncover potential security breaches.
However, as the Newsweek article points out, the electronic-voting machine industry argues that openness would hurt the competitive position of the current market leaders. A report released by the Election Technology Council, a U.S. trade association, in April this year says that disclosing information on known vulnerabilities might help would-be attackers more than those who would defend against such attacks. Some computer scientists have proposed that computer code be disclosed only to a limited group of certified experts. Making such disclosure mandatory for all electronic voting machines would be a good first step for preventing vote fraud, and also be consistent with openness in the electoral process.
Now Madras High Court is hearing soon a PIL on the EVMs. This is good news. I believe time has arrived for taking a long hard look at these riggable machines that favour the ruling party that which has ensured a pliant Election Commission. Otherwise elections would soon become ridiculed and lose their credibility. The demise of democracy would then be near. Hence evidence must be now collected by all political parties to determine how many constituencies they suspect rigging. The number would not exceed 75 in my opinion. We can identify them as follows: In the 2009 General Elections, any result in which the main losing candidate of a recognized party finds that more than 10% of the polling booths showed less than 5 votes per booth, should be taken prima facie a constituency in which rigging has taken place. This is because the main recognized parties usually have more than 5 party workers per booth, and hence with their families would poll a minimum of 25 votes per booth for their party candidate. Hence if these 25 voters can given affidavits affirming who they had voted for, then the High Court can treat it as evidence and order a full inquiry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Gitanjali Swamy is the daughter of Dr.Subramanian Swamy
Whatever he can say as devil's advocate, there is nothing extraordinary that the Congressmen achieved to be reelected to a second term under MMSingh. Vajpayee's five year term in comparison was a golden era and yet he lost the reelection because of what he didn't do for the Hindus.
There are lot of pointers to this election being rigged and bought. The Sonia's mafiaso are the most corrupt people on earth. There is concerted effort to portray them as angels using this rigged election. The people have been in shock at the results. Wait until they rise. The Congressmen will then know how much of their 'voters' support is with them when they confront them on the street.
And anyone who thinks that the mafiaso will respect real democracy and not indulge in rigging to protect their ill-gotton wealth is a fool.
Anyone who thinks that the 'election' has settled the matter is naive. The BJP or any other opposition has not committed any grave sin to be shown the door to oblivion. There is bound to be a leadership change and the people's anger will be properly directed and the defrauders will be consigned to where they belong.
Here is Dr. Subramanian Swamy's letter to the Secretary to the Election Commission and his press statement on this issue.
The Secretary May 29, 2009
Election Commission of India
Ashoka Road,
New Delhi 110001
Re: Demand for an absolute requirement of a paper trail to substantiate and verify the election results as obtained from the EVMs presently being used by the Election Commission
Dear Sir:
As you are well aware, for several years now it has been widely felt that it is possible to manipulate the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMâs) presently being used by the Election Commission of India. In the US and Europe, necessary modifications and safeguarding of the integrity of the EVMs are currently under intense discussion [seewww.verifiedvoting.org].
In or around late 1999, I myself had arranged before the then three Election Commissioners, a presentation in this behalf by Professor E.S.Sarma of the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A, and Dr. Gitanjali Swamy .Professor Sarma is an acknowledged expert in the field of artificial intelligence and holds a patent for the software for RFID; and Dr. Gitanjali Swamyâs doctoral dissertation, from the University of California at Berkeley was precisely on this subject of verification i.e. how to ensure that machines are actually doing the work they were intended to do. They demonstrated to the satisfaction of the then Chief Election Commissioner, Mr. M.S. Gill, that it was very possible for some one or more of the various persons having access to the EVMâ s at different points of time, to plant a software program, that would have the effect of producing an election result in favor of a particular candidate/ political party. However, at the time, Mr. Gill had opined that such a collusion would require the cooperation of too many persons and therefore would leak out; and hence he felt it was quite unfeasible in practice. Even then, I had demanded then that some sort of a paper trail should always be maintained, so that in case of dispute or material doubt (such as, for example, has arisen recently in the 2009 General Elections, in the Sivaganga [Tamil Nadu] Lok Sabha constituency), this paper trail would be available to substantiate/ repudiate the results as declared by the EVMâs. But this was not done.
Since then, in the last decade, public realization of the above drawbacks, has become widespread internationally. In October 2006 the Netherlands banned all EVMâs. In March 2009,after hearings that stretched over almost two years, the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic of Germany ruled that voting through EVMâs was unconstitutional. In 2007, after conducting a top-to-bottom review of many of the voting systems certified for use in California, its Secretary of State strengthened the security requirements and use conditions ,requiring all EVMâs to have paper backups. Thereafter, till today a further 27 states of the US have followed suit.
Large numbers of Indian voters too, have lost faith in the results of voting as reflected in the EVMâs. Writ Petitions challenging these results have been filed this May in the High Courts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala; but significantly the Election Commission has so far failed to take steps in regard even to a representation to the Commission arising from an earlier PIL filed in 2004 in the Supreme Court of India by Dr. Satinath Choudhary.
Therefore ,by this Notice, I call upon the Election Commission of India, as a first step, in the process of ensuring that the results of elections conducted by it, are not hijacked by manipulation in the EVMâs , to provide for a paper backup to all EVMâs, as set out hereinbelow :
âOnce approved, the voter views the ballot and makes the desired selections â¦..If the voter confirms that the choices displayed are correct ,the machine records the vote on some storage medium such as a CD-ROM or flash memory and overwrites the smart card with random numbers to prevent its reuse â¦â¦.The voting machine then prints out a human readable ballot ,which is confirmed by the voter, who then deposits it in the ballot box , which poll workers are monitoring. If the election is later disputed, officials can optically scan these paper ballots or hand-count them.â(See May 2009 issue of the IEEE Computer Society, pages 23 to 29, Article by Nathanael Paul and Andrew S. Tannenbaum:âTrustworthy Voting: From Machine to Systemâ).
Furthermore the result as so tabulated by the EVMâs should ,in the first instance, be regarded only as a preliminary result; and in case of dispute, it is the manually tabulated count based on the paper trail which must be the final result.
I would be grateful for an early and favorable response to my above demand, failing which it will be necessary to approach the courts for relief.
Yours Sincerely
Subramanian Swamy
=============================================
<b> <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'> Are EVMs Safe? </b></span>
Subramanian Swamy
(fmr. Union Law Minister)
There is much talk today about the possibility of rigging of electoral outcomes in the recent General Elections to the Lok Sabha. These doubts have arisen from the unexpected number of seats won by the Congress nation-wide, and which doubts are accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals as also in the popular international press which raise doubts about the EVMs.
For example, the respected International Electrical & Electronics Engineering Journal (The IEEE, May 2009, p.23) has published an article by two eminent Professors of Computer Science, titled: âTrustworthy Votingâ in which they conclude that while electronic voting machines offer a myriad of benefits, these cannot be reaped unless nine suggested safeguards are put in place for the protecting the integrity of the outcomes. None of these nine safeguards are in place in Indian EVMs.Electronic voting machines in India today do not meet the standard of national integrity and safeguard the sanctity of democracy.
Newsweek magazine issue (dated June 1, 2009) has published an article by Evgeny Morozo, who points out that when Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme in 2006, such as fancy touch-screen voting machines, it was widely welcomed: Three years and Euro 51 million later, in April, the government scrapped the entire initiative. What doomed the effort was a lack of trust: the electorate just didnât like that the machines would record their votes as mere electronic blips, with no tangible record.
Morozov points out that one doesnât have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the fallibility of electronic voting machines. As most PC users know by now, computers can be hacked. We are not unwilling to accept this security risk in banking, shopping and e-mailing since the fraud is at the micro-level, and of individual consequence which in most cases is rectifiable. But the ballot box needs to be perfectly safeguarded because of the monumental consequence of a rigged or faulty vote recording. It is of macro significance much like an âe-coup dâetatâ. At least thatâs what voters across Europe seem to have said loud and clear.
Thus, a backlash against e-voting is brewing all over the European continent. After almost two years of deliberations, Germanyâs Supreme Court ruled last March that e-voting was unconstitutional because the average citizen could not be expected to understand the exact steps involved in the recording and tallying of votes. Political scientist Ulrich Wiesner, a physicist who filed the initial lawsuit said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that the Dutch Nedap machines used in Germany are even less secure than mobile phones! The Dutch public-interest group Wij Vertrouwen Stemcomputers Niet (We Do Not Trust Voting Machines) produced a video showing how quickly the Nedap machines could be hacked without voters or election officials being aware (the answer: in five minutes!). After the clip was broadcast on national television in October 2006, the Netherlands banned all electronic voting machines.
Numerous electronic-voting inconsistencies in developing countries, where governments are often all too eager to manipulate votes, have only added to the controversy. After Hugo Chavez won the 2004 election in Venezuela, it came out that the government owned 28 percent of Bizta, the company that manufactured the voting machines. On the eve of the 2009 elections in India, I had in a press conference in Chennai raised the issue and pointed out that those who had been convicted in the US for hacking of bank accounts on the internet and credit cards had been recruited just before the elections. In the US, the Secretary of State of California has now set up a full-fledged inquiry into EVMs, after staying all further use.
Why are the EVMs so vulnerable? Each step in the life cycle of a voting machine â from the time it is developed and installed to when the votes are recorded and the data transferred to a central repository for tallying â involves different people gaining access to the machines, often installing new software. It wouldnât be hard for, say, an election official to paint a parallel programme under another password, on one or many voting machines that would ensure one outcome or another pre-determined even before voters arrived at the poll stations. .
These dangers have been known to the Election Commission since 2000, when Dr,.M.S. Gill, the then CEC, had arranged at my initiative for Professor Sanjay Sarma of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Gitanjali Swamy of Harvard to demonstrate how unsafeguarded the chips in EVMs were. Some changes in procedures were made subsequently by the EC, but not on the fundamental flaws that make it compliant to hacking. In 2004, the Supreme Court First Bench, of Chief Justice V.N. Khare, Justices Babu and Kapadia had directed the Election Commission to consider the technical flaws in EVMs put forward by Prof. Satinath Choudhary a US based software engineer in PIL. But the EC has failed to consider his representation.
There are many ways to prevent EVM fraud. One way to reduce the risk of fraud is to have machines print a paper record of each vote, which voters could then deposit into a conventional ballot box. While this procedure would ensure that each vote can be verified, using paper ballots defeats the purpose of electronic voting in the first place. Using two machines produced by different manufacturers would decrease the risk of a security compromise, but wouldnât eliminate it.
A better way, it is argued in the above cited IEEE article, is to expose the software behind electronic voting machines to public scrutiny. The root problem of popular electronic machines is that the computer programs that run them are usually closely held trade secrets (it doesnât help that the software often runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is not the worldâs most secure). Having the software closely examined and tested by experts not affiliated with the company would make it easier to close technical loopholes that hackers can exploit. Experience with Web servers has shown that opening software to public scrutiny can uncover potential security breaches.
However, as the Newsweek article points out, the electronic-voting machine industry argues that openness would hurt the competitive position of the current market leaders. A report released by the Election Technology Council, a U.S. trade association, in April this year says that disclosing information on known vulnerabilities might help would-be attackers more than those who would defend against such attacks. Some computer scientists have proposed that computer code be disclosed only to a limited group of certified experts. Making such disclosure mandatory for all electronic voting machines would be a good first step for preventing vote fraud, and also be consistent with openness in the electoral process.
Now Madras High Court is hearing soon a PIL on the EVMs. This is good news. I believe time has arrived for taking a long hard look at these riggable machines that favour the ruling party that which has ensured a pliant Election Commission. Otherwise elections would soon become ridiculed and lose their credibility. The demise of democracy would then be near. Hence evidence must be now collected by all political parties to determine how many constituencies they suspect rigging. The number would not exceed 75 in my opinion. We can identify them as follows: In the 2009 General Elections, any result in which the main losing candidate of a recognized party finds that more than 10% of the polling booths showed less than 5 votes per booth, should be taken prima facie a constituency in which rigging has taken place. This is because the main recognized parties usually have more than 5 party workers per booth, and hence with their families would poll a minimum of 25 votes per booth for their party candidate. Hence if these 25 voters can given affidavits affirming who they had voted for, then the High Court can treat it as evidence and order a full inquiry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Gitanjali Swamy is the daughter of Dr.Subramanian Swamy