Evm: Dangers Of Trusting Them Too Much

Capt M Kumar · 05-31-2009, 11:43 PM

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06-02-2009, 10:35 PM

BJP wins Kapkot by-election

Hardly a month before the total washout the BJP experience in the Log Sabha polls in Uttarkhandâs surprice victory has come their way. The Lok Sabha results even prompted the CM to offer his resignation

The BJP has won the Kapkot by-election in the Uttarkhand assembly giving it a majority in the government. It is quite supricing to believe this victory close on the heels of being defeated in all the five lok Sabha seats. The BJP candidate beat the congress candidate by 7,167 votes. About 55 % of the voters voted in the election.

The murmurs on the possibility of the EVM fraud in Loksabha elections are getting louder.

http://www.haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.aspx...eID=8748&SKIN=B
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Comments

EVM fraud
I belong to Uttrakhand and have a first hand knowledge of the elections. THERE IS NO WAY CONGRESS WUD HAVE WON HERE, except for The today's worse than Jaichand Naveen Chawla who would go down in history as the worst villan.
Congress was so mentally defeated that it had removed its polling agents at many Booths. THIS ELECTION IS A FRAUD PERPERATED ON THIS NATION BY VILE, EVIL WHITES AND THEIR KEEP. THAT'S WHY NOW WHITES AUSTRALIAN PIGS HAVE BECOME BOLD ENOUGH TO ATTACK INDIANS. SONIA MAINO AND HER PIGLETS HAVE RAPED THIS COUNTRY

06-04-2009, 06:34 AM

2004 Election : American Right Wing Conspiracy

In the USA, there has been a strong movement against fraudulent use of electronic voting mechanism by corporate interests and political groups. The huge difference between all the major exit polls and the actual election result is a reason to worry about the fraudulent misuse of electronic voting mechanism. Republicans were desperate to win as the war on terror and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at crucial stage. Similar to the difference between exit polls and poll results in India, there was huge difference between the exit poll results and actual election results in the 2004 reelection of former US president George Bush. This difference led to several independent investigations. Whistle blowers and watchdog groups have inturn unearthed a major right wing conspiracy that titled the American public opinion using the electronic voting machine software. Indian EVM are claimed to be much less complex and less prone to manipulation or rigging, but experts don't rule out the possibility of fraud. Indigenous machines are not networked, but are not immune from manipulation.

Private companies like Diebold, whose owners are close to the Bush Government are now being questioned for their lack of integrity and fraudulent use of the digital voting system that allegedly rigged major US elections under the former US President. There is no such disputes about the integrity of the government controlled defence electronic units that manufactured the indigenous EVMs. The nation was taken aback by the open allegation made by the former Chief Election Commissioner Gopalaswami against his colleague and the current election commissioner, Navin Chawla being a stooge of the ruling party.

US Activists investigating the 2004 Presidential election have identified hundreds of preceincts in Florida, Ohio and other states where the voting results did not match the exit polls. These inconsistencies occurred primarily in precincts where electronic voting machines with no paper trail were used. In Florida, these discrepancies contributed for George Bush's statewide "victory" margin. Many of them were in precincts with a strong Democratic majority. In the USA many media commentators have explained the gap between the exit polls and the final vote counts by claiming that the exit polls were flawed. However, in those precincts where there was a machine that produced a "paper trail," the exit polls almost exactly matched the actual vote and there were few discrepancies giving George Bush extra votes. When a voter casts his or her ballot for someone other than the candidate they intended to vote for, this is called a "misvote." Misvotes in Ohio,Florida, and New Mexico appear to have given George Bush his winning percentage. (Misvotes favoring George Bush reached as high as 40% on some vote machines in some Florida, Ohio and New Mexico precincts. There were also high misvote totals in other states. Is it just an accidental coincidence that one of the senior officials holding top positions in the EVM manufacturing defence units was posted in the New York Office of the Indian company and maintained close contacts with their US counterparts under the former US president. In fact the electoral victory of Barack Obama in the latest US election could not happen, if the American people were not vigilant about the electronic vote fraud perpetuated by right wing politicians with the help of government officials and the corporate sector. For details (http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html)

http://www.futuregov.net/articles/2009/may...etter-paper-ba/

According to Madhav Ragam, Director, Government & Education, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Growth Markets Unit, IBM, while India does a good job considering the "mind-boggling" scale and complexity of its elections, no voting process is invulnerable. "There is usually a weak point in the system, internal or external, that can be exploited. The technological challenge is how you put the necessary processes and procedures in place to ensure that as little as possible falls through the cracks."

In an interesting piece on dangers of digital voting, Bruce Shneier said: "DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn't take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold: it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended, and it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine." He added: "Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions: it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected, a public analysis that improves security; and it increases public confidence in the voting process - if the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code (companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don't believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security

06-04-2009, 06:50 AM

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Y EVEGNY MOROZOV:

One way to dispel anxiety about electronic voting machines is to open the software to public scrutiny

WHEN Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme in 2006 that would dispense with âstupid old pencils,â as then-prime minister Bertie Ahern put it, in favor of fancy touchscreen voting machines, it seemed that the nation was embracing its technological future.
Three years and euro 51 million later, in April, the government scrapped the entire initiative. High costs were one concern â finishing the project would take another euro 28 million.

But 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.

One doesnât have to be a conspiracy theorist or a Luddite to understand the fallibility of electronic voting machines. As most PC users by now know, computers have bugs, and can be hacked. Wetake on this security risk in banking, shopping and emailing, but the ballot box must be perfectly sealed. At least thatâs what European voters seem to be saying. Electronic voting machines do not meet this standard.

A backlash against e-voting is brewing all over the continent. After almost two years of deliberations, Germanyâs Supreme Court ruled in 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 Joachim Wiesner and his son Ulrich, a physicist, filed the initial lawsuit and have been instrumental in raising public awareness of the insecurity of electronic voting. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the younger Wiesner said, with some justification, 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: 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 per cent of Bizta, the company that manufactured the voting machines.

Why are the machines 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 plant a âTrojanâ program on one or many voting machines that would ensure one outcome or another, even before voters arrived at the stations.

It would be just as easy to compromise the privacy of voters, identifying who voted for whom.

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 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.

The electronic-voting industry argues that openness would hurt the competitive position of the current market leaders. A report released by the Election Technology Council, a US trade association, in April 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 the Obama administration, consistent with his talk about openness in government.

Heâd better hurry, though, before a wave of populism kills electronic voting. State and local governments across the United States, much like European governments, are getting increasingly impatient with e-voting. Riverside County in California is considering asking voters to choose between e-voting and paper ballots in a referendum. Voters would be justified in dispensing with e-voting altogether. Atthe moment, thereâs very little to like about it.

06-06-2009, 09:57 PM

AryanKji,

The moot question asked is why is Advani and his BJP are not raising the rigging of the election in a big way, not that I am disputing that it has been rigged.

What is the use of all of us raising sh1t while the leader and his party are burying their head in the sand.

You can't run with cannon ball rivetted to your feet.

This is the constitutional democracy that everyone is asking us to be part of. It stinks to high heavens. Truely all of should revolt against the BJP and the RSS. We need drastic change.

Capt M Kumar · (This post was last modified: 06-06-2009, 10:29 PM by Capt M Kumar.)

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--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /> Savithri ji,
Don't lose heart.
Forum's purpose is to lay threadbare all the causes there can be.
It all started w/ in my view by 1 ?Mohan Rawle of Shiv Sena who contested this election and got just 5 votes in 1 of the booths which was supposed to be stronghold of Shiv Sena.
Then in 1 of my posts, I have already said that 2 petitions have been filed.
+ Orissa BJP has raised it.
Why BJP on national level is not taking it up?
I think they know it better that it can't be proved.
And let the ground swell rise so that next general election can be taken care of.
<img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbup.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbup.gif' /> so, pl continue shooting till then.
Keep it up! <img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/specool.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='specool.gif' />
Moreover, Bhagwan Krishna said in Geeta:
karmaniev adhikara te
ma faleshu kadachan!

06-06-2009, 10:59 PM

Savithri ji,

BJP is right now busy whether to turn extreme right or to move center-right idelogically. They don't have time for this EVM rigging stuff.

06-07-2009, 06:17 AM

Ex-RSS chief questions EVM credibility

Former RSS chief KS Sudarshan has questioned the credibility of the electronic voting machines (EVMs) used during polls instead of ballot papers.

âThe general election have become contempt of democracy as machines are playing a greater role than the voters,â he said while addressing the concluding day of the State-level Sangha Shiksha Varga here on Friday.

Various political parties have successfully tampered the EVMs to continue in power, which was witnessed in West Bengal way back in 2004, Sudarshan said. âIt was a shock for the democracy,â he said, adding that the EVMs are not being used in developed countries like Germany and the USA.

The party, which more than 50 per cent of the population opposed, is now the ruler, he said, indirectly referring to the Congress at the Centre.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/181361/Ex-RSS-...redibility.html

06-07-2009, 06:51 AM

AIADMK's imperious chief Jayalalithaa doesn't quite know what to make of the explanation her nominee for P Chidambaram's Sivaganga seat, Raja Kannappan, offered after his narrow defeat in the elections. Kannappan was leading from the beginning and with each round of counting, he increased his margin. Later, he was to tell Jayalalithaa that by the afternoon, when he had piled up a handsome lead of some 20,000 votes over Chidambaram and there were just a handful of EVMs left to count, he decided he could afford to take it easy. A dispirited Chidambaram and his son-cum-election manager had left the counting centre. Kannappan too decided to slip away and go to his wife's Samadhi for thanksgiving. He was gone for two hours, long enough for the picture to alter completely. By the time he returned, Chidambaram had already demanded and got a recount and was declared winner by a little over 3,000 votes. He was taken to a room at the back and handed his victory certificate, after which he quietly drove away without meeting the large crowd of reporters and Congress supporters waiting outside. It will remain a mystery why Kannappan chose to disappear at a crucial point in the counting when he was just a few EVMs away from victory. AIADMK circles smell something fishy but after such a comprehensive defeat in Tamil Nadu, even Jayalalithaa doesn't seem to have the heart for a confrontation with either Chidambaram or his friend-in-arms, M K Alagiri, who is the DMK's rising star in south TN.

06-13-2009, 06:13 AM

The point is there has been selective rigging and the biggest losers have been the fellow secular parties of the Congress who act like the thieves stung by a scorpion. They can't squeal!

The BJP had a lukewarm and aged leader with bad advisors like Kulkarni. His only claim to be leader was his seniority to which the common folks could not relate. There is no such great issue affecting the Hindus like Ayodhya. And Ramasethu was not much of a BJP issue as much as it was that of Dr.Subramanian Swamy and the VHP. The Congress was content to leave it for Karunanidhi's folks dealing with it so they could use it as an escape route if it became an election issue. Luckily for them it got bogged down in court.

Sankaracharya issue is also bogged down in the Court and the powers that be has decided to play dirty politics by transferring the Hindu judge and posting a Muslim judge in his place.

Sikhs and Hindus are voting for the Congress. Either they are utterly stupid or the election is rigged.

I know which one.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 06-18-2009, 09:46 PM by Husky.)

Iran cheated, so US cries and complains. But US and their extensions in India cheated Bharatam and US and its unIndian puppets (KKKangress) are silent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/jun/...lection-rigging
QUOTEWednesday, June 17, 2009
Mullahs May Have Rigged Polls Thru Software
The mullahs in Tehran may have rigged the election in their favour using software. This is yet another warning that India shouldn't blindly go in for electronic voting technology that leaves no audit trail.

The Iranian Interior Ministry official who leaked this information has now suspiciously died from a car accident. The regime is not looking good right now.

I must say that I am very impressed by the strong turnout of the Iranian masses on the streets. Clearly the mullahs will not be facing docile sheep as they had hoped. Perhaps they'll have to stage a war with Israel in order to create a much-needed distraction.
Posted by san at 6/17/2009 11:45:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: corruption, iran, theocracyTo what extent is this the underground America-driven 'democratic' Iranian group and to what extent are any of these genuinely interested Iranians (without bias and without external engineering)? How can anyone tell?

"Choose: Mullocracy or AmeriKKKa."
"Uhhh, can we have Ahura Mazda, please?"
"Nah, it's christianism or islamism for you, Iranian! Else we'll bring in Revolutionary Democratic Mullocracy - the Guillotine Way."

One of the news headlines a couple of days back was America shrieking something like how it did not believe ahmedinejad (or however you spell it) was fairly elected. Ya don't say.
But it becomes fair when Americans 'democratically' elect someone in another country is it? (E Europe's pretty-coloured revolutions. And KKKangress.
My memory is a bit dusty on this, but wasn't it WitSSel and his performing monkeys that threatened a few years back now that they were going to focus on the 2009 Indian elections. The post may be here on IF - or, I suppose, it's just in my head. Anyone remember something like this, or does it sound unfamiliar?)

ramana · 06-18-2009, 10:21 PM

About Indian EVMs were there anycase where the total was more than the number of voters registered?

06-18-2009, 10:25 PM

Are electronic voting machines tamper-proof?

Subramanian Swamy

QUOTENo, argues the author, because each step in the life cycle of a voting machine involves different people gaining access to the machines, often installing new software. But there are many ways of preventing EVM fraud.
Is there a possibility of rigging electoral outcomes in a general election to the Lok Sabha? This question has arisen not only because of the unexpected number of seats won or lost by some parties in the recent contest. It is accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals and in the popular international press, which raise doubts about the integrity of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

For example, the respected International Electrical & Electronics Engineering Journal (IEEE, May 2009, p.23) has published an article by two eminent professors of computer science, titled âTrustworthy Voting.â They conclude that although electronic voting machines do offer a myriad of benefits, these cannot be reaped unless nine suggested safeguards are put in place for protecting the integrity of the outcome. None of these nine safeguards, however, is in place in Indian EVMs. Hence, electronic voting machines in India today do not meet the standard of national integrity or safeguard the sanctity of our democracy.

Newsweek (issue of June 1, 2009) has published an interesting article by Evgeny Morozov, who points out that when Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme in 2006, such as touch-screen voting machines, the innovation was widely welcomed. Three years and 51 million euros later, the government scrapped the entire initiative. What doomed the effort was a lack of peopleâs trust in the machines. Voters just didnât like that the machines would record their votes as mere electronic blips, with no tangible record.

Mr. Morozov points out that, as most PC-users know, computers can be hacked. While 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), the ballot box is sacred. It needs to be perfectly safeguarded because of the monumental consequence of a rigged or faulty vote recording. It is of macro-significance, in the nature of an e-coup dâetat. At least thatâs what voters across Europe seem to have said loud and clear.

Thus, a backlash against e-voting is brewing across the European continent. After nearly two years of deliberation, 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. Ulrich Wiesner, a software consultant who holds a Ph.D. in physics and who filed the initial lawsuit, said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that the Dutch Nedap machines used in Germany were even less secure than mobile phones!

In fact, the Dutch public-interest group âWij Vertrouwen Stemcomputers Nietâ (âWe Do Not Trust Voting Machinesâ) produced a video showing how quickly the Nedap machines could be hacked without voters or election officials being aware (it took just five minutes). After the clip was broadcast on Dutch national television in October 2006, the Netherlands banned all electronic voting machines from use in elections.

Numerous electronic voting inconsistencies in developing countries, where governments are often all too eager to manipulate votes, have only fuelled the controversy. After Hugo Chavez won the 2004 election in Venezuela, it came out that the government owned 28 per cent of Bizta, the company that manufactured the voting machines. On the eve of the 2009 elections in India, I raised the issue at a press conference in Chennai, pointing out that a political party just before the elections had recruited those who had been convicted in the U.S. for hacking bank accounts on the Internet and credit cards.

In the U.S. too, there is a significant controversy on Elms. In fact, the Secretary of State of California has 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, before voters arrived at the poll stations, ensure a pre-determined outcome.

The Election Commission of India has known of these dangers since 2000. Dr M. S. Gill, the then CEC, had arranged at my initiative for Professor Sanjay Sarma, the father of RFID software fame at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his wife Dr Gitanjali Swamy of Harvard, to demonstrate how unsafeguarded the chips in EVMs were. Some changes in procedure were made subsequently by the EC. But the fundamental flaws, which made them compliant to hacking, remained.

In 2004, the Supreme Courtâs First Bench, comprising Chief Justice V. N. Khare and Justices Babu and Kapadia, directed the Election Commission to consider the technical flaws in EVMs put forward by Satinath Choudhary, a U.S.-based software engineer, in a 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 will 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 decreases the risk of a security compromise, but doesnât eliminate it.

A better way, it is argued in the IEEE article I have cited, is to expose the software behind electronic voting machines to public scrutiny. The root problem of popular electronic machines is that the computer programmes 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 will hurt the competitive position of the current market leaders. A report released in April by the Election Technology Council, a U.S. trade association, 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 codes should be disclosed to a limited group of certified experts. Making such disclosure mandatory for all electronic voting machines will be a good first step for preventing vote fraud. It will also be consistent with openness in the electoral process.

Now several High Courts are hearing PILs on the EVMs. This is good news. I believe the time has arrived for the Supreme Court to transfer these cases to itself, and take a long, hard look at these riggable machines that favour a ruling party that can ensure a pliant Election Commission.

Else, elections will soon lose their credibility and the demise of democracy will be near. Hence evidence must now be collected by all political parties to determine the number of constituencies in which they suspect rigging. The number will not exceed 75, in my opinion. We can identify them as follows: any 2009 general election result in which the main losing candidate of a recognised party found that more than 10 per cent of the polling booths showed fewer than five votes per booth should be taken, prima facie, as a constituency in which rigging took place. This is because the main recognised parties usually have more than five party workers per booth, and hence with their families will poll a minimum of 25 votes per booth for their party candidate. If these 25 voters can give affidavits affirming who they voted for, the High Court can treat this as evidence and order a full inquiry.


http://www.hindu.com/2009/06/17/stories/...160900.htm

Husky · (This post was last modified: 06-20-2009, 06:25 PM by Husky.)

http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/evm...improvised.html

Hard to read at link, so here:
QUOTESaturday, June 20, 2009
EVMs of 2009 polls used 'improvised features' in the control programs
jun 20, 2009

ha! the smoking gun! the new and improvised [sic] feature? the trojan horse. this is the way the trojan horse was introduced into 180,000 EVMs.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: S. Kalyanaraman

http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/elec...voting-machines
EVMs of 2009 polls used 'improvised features' in the control programs
The cat is out of the bag. Azera Rahman reports that EVMs used in 2009 polls use new programs/control systems.

What impact did these program revisions have on the increased possibilities of EVM tampering?
Serious questions arise which cannot be brushed away under the carpet considering the public nature of the election process held for 2009 Lok Sabha elections and the likelihood that further use of EVMs may be declared unconstitutional.

Indiresan Commission Report had noted that *every* key stroke on EVM is logged and recorded. The report dated 19 June 2009 of Azera Rahman (appended below) notes that the programs used on EVMs had been modified and machines with modified programs ("improvised features like in-built clocks which record the exact time a ballot is cast") -- 102,000 units from BEL and 78,000 units from ECIL were said to have been procured in January 2009.
Who audited these 'improvised features'? Was the fact that program modifications were made communicated to the parties contesting the 2009 election so that the polling agents could have stayed alert to identify the new machines with improvised features?
This is a serious issue pointing to the possibility of introducing trojan horses on select new EVMs.

Supreme Court should intervene immediately and issue a stay order on the further use of EVMs until a comprehensive systems audit is completed on the lines of the audit done in USA by academic institutions and computer experts.

Prof. Indiresan Commitee Report on Electronic Voting Machines provided by the Election Commission of India through RTI.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6794194/Expert-C...e-Report-on-EVM

Blog link http://theoverlord.wordpress.com/2009/05/1...oting-machines/
See discussions at: http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/05/lin...-evm-fraud.html

Kalyanaraman

http://blog.taragana.com/n/electronic-voti...emocracy-86599/
Electronic voting machines - the leitmotif of Indian democracy
Azera Rahman (GAEA news)

19 june 2009

The Indian election is about the 714 million electorate, the many thousands who play the electoral field and the virtual army of people working behind the scenes.

But it is also about a pintsized contraption - the electronic voting machine (EVM) - that has become the leitmotif of the world's largest democratic exercise and gets smarter with each avatar.

It not only does the obvious - records the vote - but also notes the exact time it is cast. The new and improved machines also give hourly updates of balloting, besides of course aiding in the counting of votes.

Forget about counting chads, the inconvenient little slips that had tripped the US presidential election in 2000, the EVMs have ensured that the counting of the many million votes is done in a matter of hours. Results of the general election, or an assembly election in one of the states, are declared a short while after the counting start.

In Election 2009 held in April and May, an estimated 1.36 million EVMs were used in 828,000 polling booths across this vast country.

According to Amol Newaskar, general manager of Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) in India's IT city of Bangalore, the machines supplied for the elections conducted over five phases have improvised on the older version.

BEL, which is one of the two public sector companies manufacturing EVMs for the Election Commission, has supplied 65,000 EVMs since 2000.

"However, the ones manufactured from 2007 onwards have improvised features like in-built clocks which record the exact time a ballot is cast," Newaskar said.

"Not just that, the EVM also records the exact time when the whole balloting process starts and when the last vote is cast. It gives an hourly update of the number of votes cast, and if there is any unusual trend in the process, it can be easily detected. Thus, the whole process becomes tamper-proof," he added.

For instance, if there is a heavy rush in polling at a particular hour, the officials can be on alert or if a voter thinks that his vote is being tampered with, the exact time when he cast his vote can be retrieved.

The Election Commission, according to Newaskar, placed an order for 102,000 EVMs to BEL for the 2009 general election - all of which were supplied by January.

The other company authorised by the Election Commission to manufacture EVMs is the Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) that has supplied 78,000 machines with the improvised features.

For the benefit of the visually impaired, the EVMs also have Braille markings on them.

Costing 9,800 rupees (about $195), it is no wonder that EVMs are a mega hit on the global stage as well.

Bhutan got 4,140 of them for its elections last year and Nepal has acquired them too. And inquiries for the Indian-made election tool have come in from

all over. The Namibian government has placed orders for 2,000 voting machines, while Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria have evinced interest as

have neighbours Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Malaysia, said Newaskar, had also shown interest. According to K.S. Rajasekhara Rao, chairman of ECIL, which supplied the EVMs in the Bhutan elections: "Many others countries like Sri Lanka, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria and Bangladesh have expressed a keen interest in acquiring these machines too."

Although the new EVMs have improvised features, most countries want the machines with further modifications.

The basic unit, easy to carry and no bigger than a briefcase, comes in two interconnected parts - the ballot unit, accessed by the voter who punches her vote, and the control unit that registers all related data like the total votes cast.

Most voters find it easy to use.

Vani Mittal, a second year graduation student of Delhi University, did not find using the EVM difficult at all when she voted for the first time in the assembly elections last year.

"The EVM is quite user-friendly. You have the name of the candidate and the party symbol clearly stated; so there is no question of any confusion," Mittal said.

"As a child, whenever my father used to go to vote I used to accompany him.

So I knew how tedious the earlier process was. After deciding whom you want to vote for, you have to fold the ballot paper in a particular manner and

drop it in the box. The EVMs have made the process so much easier," she added.

Even so, to attract voters in the general election, the election office in the capital New Delhi has uploaded a video on using EVMs on YouTube.

"Sometimes people are confused and unaware of how to use EVMs. So, in order to spread more awareness, we have uploaded a training video on usage of EVMs on popular video sharing website YouTube," said Delhi's chief electoral officer Satbir Silas Bedi.

http://blog.taragana.com/n/electronic-voti...emocracy-86599/

Posted by nizhal yoddha at 6/20/2009 05:37:00 AM

06-22-2009, 09:50 PM

How to Trust Electronic Voting

QUOTEElectronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted. In 2008, more than one-third of the states, including New Jersey and Texas, still did not require all votes to be recorded on paper. Representative Rush Holt has introduced a good bill that would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections. Congress should pass it while there is still time to get ready for 2010.

In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft â by malicious software or computer hacking â did not change the outcome. If there is a close election, there is also no way of conducting a meaningful recount.

Mr. Holtâs bill would require paper ballots to be used for every vote cast in November 2010. It would help prod election officials toward the best of the currently available technologies: optical-scan voting. With optical scans, voters fill out a paper ballot that is then read by computer â much like a standardized test. The votes are counted quickly and efficiently by computer, but the paper ballot remains the official vote, which can then be recounted by hand.

The bill would also require the states to conduct random hand recounts of paper ballots in 3 percent of the precincts in federal elections, and more in very close races. These routine audits are an important check on the accuracy of the computer count.

The bill has several provisions designed to ease the transition for cash-strapped local governments. It authorizes $1 billion in financing to replace non-complying voting systems, and more money to pay for the audits. It also allows states extra time to phase out A.T.M.-style machines, in which voters make their choices on a computer screen and the machine produces a paper record â like a receipt â of the vote.

Such machines are more reliable than paperless voting. But they are still not ideal, since voters do not always check the paper record to be sure it is accurate. By 2014, machines that produce paper trails would have to be replaced by ones in which voters directly record their votes on paper â the best system of all.

The House leadership should make passing Mr. Holtâs bill a priority. Few issues
matter as much as ensuring that election results can be trusted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/opinio...2.htm?_r=1

This article is from today's editorial in New York times.
BJP got royally screwed by CIA & Congress.

06-23-2009, 07:33 PM

EVMs cannot be tampered, vouches CEC Chawla

QUOTEAllaying all doubts on the possibility of Electronic Voting Machine tampering, Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla [ Images ] on Tuesday said the machines used in India are stand-alone machines and cannot be manipulated.
"Our machines are different from the ones used in Europe and America which works on an operating system. Our machines have built-in chips and cannot communicate with anything outside. They cannot be manipulated," Chawla told mediapersons in Shillong after a conference of all Chief Electoral Officers of the country.

He said the machines are manufactured by two public sector units and not by private companies. "Several courts in the country have looked into different aspects of the doubts raised, and all the courts, including the apex court, have meticulously said in their judgment that the machines are completely reliable," the CEC said, adding that a three-member technical committee headed by former Madras Indian Institute of Technology director Professor P V Indiresan had also dismissed all the doubts.

Asked whether the Commission was contemplating to revert back to ballot papers in the wake of the debate surrounding the issue, Chawla said, "Let us see. It is good to generate a healthy debate in the country."

The EC has decided to set up some committees to look into different aspects of the management of elections, he said.

"One of the committees would look into the security issues in the Naxal-hit states of the country. One will dwell on the EVM awareness, model code of conduct enforcement, urban apathy and photo electoral rolls, while another will look into the last-mile glitches," he said.

Steps are being taken to bring the photo electoral roll coverage from 82 per cent to close to 100 per cent, he said.

Talking about the conference, Chawla said they had fruitful discussions on various pertinent issues related to election management.

"The CEOs of different states shared some of the best practices that they developed during the recent elections so that others can emulate them," he said, claiming that the recent general elections and assembly elections in the six states were a success and were internationally acknowledged as being free, fair and peaceful.


http://news.rediff.com/report/2009/jun/23/...-cec-chawla.htm

**shamu** · 06-23-2009, 10:59 PM

^^^

Does any sane person expect Chawla to admit it even if it was tampered?

Public confidence can be built only by publishing the electronic design and software used, for entire world to see. Also it has to investigate in a transparent manner on specific instances of suspected EVM tampering.

Anything less than that is just gimmick.

06-26-2009, 12:17 AM

Chidambaram's election challenged in Madras HC

QUOTEA petition challenging the election of home minister P Chidambaram to the Lok Sabha from Sivaganga constituency in Tamil Nadu was filed

in the Madras High Court on Thursday by his AIADMK rival Raja Kannappan.

Kannappan, who had lost the polls from the constituency by a margin of over 3,000 votes, alleged malpractices in counting.

The AIADMK leader, in his petition, sought the court's direction to nullify Chidambaram's election to the Lower House and declare him elected.

He also sought recounting of votes for the constituency, claiming that if recounting was ordered, he would win by 7,034 votes.

Kannappan claimed that over 1,400 votes polled in his favour from Alangudi assembly segment were taken in favour of Chidambaram and that electoral officials did not take any action on his complaint.

He also alleged that Chidambaram had indulged in several electoral malpractices.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/C...how/4702581.cms

Kanappan got the first payment with promise of more payments. But he didn't receive the second payment. So now he went ahead & filed suit

Husky · (This post was last modified: 06-26-2009, 03:13 PM by Husky.)

^^ More important.

QUOTE(Husky @ Jun 18 2009, 09:44 PM)My memory is a bit dusty on this, but wasn't it WitSSel and his performing monkeys that threatened a few years back now that they were going to focus on the 2009 Indian elections. The post may be here on IF - or, I suppose, it's just in my head. Anyone remember something like this, or does it sound unfamiliar?)
[right][snapback]98900[/snapback][/right](In case it wasn't clear: no offence meant to real monkeys, of course.)

Answering my own question: it wasn't entirely just my imagination after all -

1. Red highlighting is mine, emphasis through use of Size and Bold is Mudy -
QUOTE(Mudy @ Apr 27 2006, 06:00 AM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/3676

The fact is that there is so much to say at this point -- a lot has happened since all this began in early November (I have over 4000 files and emails in my California folder, and Michael Witzel I know has at least an equal number) -- that I'll stick for now to a few bare facts about events in the last month. This summer, starting after the Beijing Roundtable (to be held May 11-13), Michael and I plan to finish writing a long article that attempts to cover every major side of the California caseÂ -- the links between the California Hindutva campaign and attempts to rebuild the faltering Hindutva movement in India (with the May 2009 elections in mind); the enormous amounts of money and manpower that the Hindutva right pumped into their California plans, which included the production of massive documents and the use of high-priced law firms; the internationally coordinated smear campaigns aimed at Michael, Madhav Deshpande, and many others who took a public stand against the Hindutva groups (there is no doubt that the smears did keep a lot of people who shouldn't have from speaking out); the role that the Internet is playing in facilitating the organization of rightwing groups internationally, of which Hindutva groups are to my mind the most notable example; the phony Websites (including phony Dalit sites) planted by the Hindutva groups, which by itself suggests the scale of their financial operations; the financing of Hindutva groups in the US, including the use of corporate facilities (like those of Medtronic, Inc.) to distribute defamatory materials; the slow process of educating the press on the links between the case and events in India -- and so on. 

I don't understand why Harvard professor and unemployed farmer is interested in Indian election?
What is their agenda?
They are neither Indian citizen nor Indian origin or married to Indian?
This is very serious and we should watch what their agenda is and who is supporting them?
Who are their bosses? Or hidden hand?
Are they part of some sort of conspiracy against India and its democratic process?
[right][snapback]50375[/snapback][/right]</div>

2. QUOTE(Mudy @ Aug 1 2006, 07:30 PM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE[Indian Studies 121. Hindutva: Sources, Methods, Implications for Research
and Teaching] - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 0362
Michael Witzel and Parimal G. Patil
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Course presents a survey of early Hindutva writings and recent developments,
especially the repercussions on the interpretation of Sanskrit texts and on
the writing of Indian history.
Note: Expected to be given in 2007-08.


Here you go. This is Witzel strategy to make impact on 2009 India's election. He will give course work to students to insult Hindus.
[right][snapback]54940[/snapback][/right]</div>

Husky · (This post was last modified: 06-28-2009, 04:23 PM by Husky.)

Some of them are hard to read, if so, it's probably at http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/elec...voting-machines

Full versions of these blog entries at links.

1. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/vot...be-trusted.html
Voting Machines Can Never Be Trusted, Says GOP Computer Security Expert
jun 24th, 2009

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: S. Kalyanaraman

http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/elec...voting-machines
Voting Machines Can Never Be Trusted, Says GOP Computer Security Expert By , Velvet Revolution
Printed on June 21, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/94895/

2. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/how...ing-reagan.html
How to Trust Electronic Voting. Reagan gave the answer about Russian missiles: trust, but verify.

http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/elec...voting-machines
A request under RTI Act should be made to EC of India to clarify: 1. If programs used on EVMs were modified in January 2009 to install date/time-recoding of a ballot; 2. if all the new EVMs (about 200,000) acquired in January 2009 were the only ones used in the 2009 elections; and 3. procedures adopted to audit and validate transparently, in consultation with political parties, to ensure that Jan. 2009 revisions were properly implemented without allowing for any external tampering using wireless chip implants in selected constituencies.
Kalyanaraman

How to Trust Electronic Voting
June 22, 2009
EDITORIAL NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/opinion/...agewanted=print

3. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/sma...-polls-bel.html
Smarter EVMs used during 2009 polls -- BEL GM Newaskar
jun 24th, 2009
yes, 'smarter'. that is, with lots of additional trojan horses in them.
http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/elec...voting-machines
Smarter EVMs to make voting tamper proof
The Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) supplied for the April-May elections have more improvised features than the older ones

4. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/evm...t-time-aha.html
http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/elec...voting-machines
EC to undertake EVM randomisation for the first time
EVM randomisation for the first time. Aha, how clever ! EVM Nos. assigned to DEO known !!

5. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/oh-...r-proof-of.html
Reprogrammed EVMs (with date/time stamping) vulnerable for tampering

6. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/06/int...der-on-evm.html
interesting comment by a reader on EVM fraud

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