Evm: Dangers Of Trusting Them Too Much

[Guest]

There are no printed record.

[ravish]

Mr Aryan K ,

The voters of India are from the general public of this nation. They are not in the habit of tolerating any large scale rigging of votes or any massive manipulation. They are very volatile by nature and on the slightest provocation come out in the streets, have no hesitation in burning down buses and trains and destroy public property.

In case, any political party would have really believed that there is something wrong with the EVM , they would have immediately used the mob power to ensure total disruption of normal life. No such thing has happened, so we should take it that the complainants are themselves not very serious with their allegation. After their poor performance in the polls, they have to give some excuse as a face saving device, so they make some stray allegations about the EVMs. Therefore, there is no point of making
it out to be a serious issue facing the nation.

[Guest]

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 (EVM’s) 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 Swamy’s 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 EVM’ 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 EVM’s. 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 EVM’s. In March 2009,after hearings that stretched over almost two years, the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic of Germany ruled that voting through EVM’s 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 EVM’s 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 EVM’s. 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 EVM’s , to provide for a paper backup to all EVM’s, as set out hereinbelow :
“Once approved, the voter views the ballot and makes the desired selections …..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 …….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.”(See May 2009 issue of the IEEE Computer Society, pages 23 to 29, Article by Nathanael Paul and Andrew S. Tannenbaum:”Trustworthy Voting: From Machine to System”).
Furthermore the result as so tabulated by the EVM’s 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: “Trustworthy Voting” 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 didn’t like that the machines would record their votes as mere electronic blips, with no tangible record.
Morozov points out that one doesn’t 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 “e-coup d’etat”. At least that’s 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, Germany’s 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 – from the time it is developed and installed to when the votes are recorded and the data transferred to a central repository for tallying – involves different people gaining access to the machines, often installing new software. It wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t 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 doesn’t help that the software often runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is not the world’s 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

[ravish]

Savitriji


None of the political parties who are outside the UPA and there is a sizable number of them both inside and outside the Parliament; have so far made faulty EVMs a major issue. Forget about mobilising the public, none of them have either moved the Courts or the Election Commission on this issue. Do you mean to say that all the political parties have ganged up together to ensure that the UPA can rig the elections and rule the nation without any difficulty and loot the people of India. Is this what you mean to convey? In the process both UPA and NDA are in league.

[Capt M Kumar]

AryanK <!--emo&:clapping--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clap.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='clap.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Thanx for starting this topic and bringing articles on it.
Ravish ji <!--emo&:argue--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/argue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='argue.gif' /><!--endemo-->
We should be thankful to political parties for not making it issue on streets. Think of it Punjab has lost 7000 crores on account of street politics for a crime which did not happen even on it's land.
At the same time, the issue can NOT be put under the carpet for the following reasons:
1. it makes Govt tainted.
2. to prevent any street politics in future on this issue.
3. citing reasons of failure of EVMs in foreign land, we should do away w/ it unless <!--emo&:ind--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/india.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='india.gif' /><!--endemo--> and until, there is paper trail attached to it as evidence to prove or disapprove any election protests.

[ravish]

Yes Captain Sahab,

You are much experienced then me in understanding the thinkings of the common mass. Setting aside arguments in this forum, do you sincerely feel that there can be nationwide EVM fraud and the people of India including the political leaders will silently digest it.

[Guest]

Ravish Bhai,

I think the Cong have rigged the polls particularly in TN, Andhra & Haryana. See the allocation of potfoliois majority of them have gone to South MP's.
Also the CIA meeting Chiru, Naidu & Advani before the counting shows something fishy. No one including Cong & Media didn't expect the 205 seats tally.

Thankyou Captainji & Savithriji for positively responding.

[Guest]

<b>How America influenced the big election victory for the Congress Party in India – Is Indian democracy a slave under the influence of CIA?</b>

There was no way Bush Administration could let India’s ruling party go out of business. India has a new name today, although very disgraceful but real. It is called a satellite nation of America just like Australia, Japan, UK, Mexico and many other central and South American countries.

So what really happened? We know congress party bought the parliamentary seats for millions of American dollars. We also know how related politicians bribed former US President Bill Clinton in the name of his “Foundation.”

It was a top priority for CIA to make sure ruling PM Manmohan Singh stays in power. India is a strategic nation to the so-called American Empire. There are indications that the new Obama Administration was initially perplexed at what Bush did to influence the Indian democratic system. But by the time Obama came to power, Bush had already launched the covert war against Indian democracy.

Very systematically money was made available to very specific areas where the communists were popular before. Take for example West Bengal. People reported enormous amount of cash resources with Congress cadres in the rural areas. The sentiment was still tilted towards the communists except in Kolkata and certain specific rural districts.

But the amount of resources made available to Trinamul Congress and the Congress party itself was so enormous that people could feel it. In India, money talks during election. People are mostly uneducated. The political parties bring them in trucks and other vehicles, promise all goodies, and ask them to vote. The local communities have local leaders. People in villages follow this local leadership like God. These local leaders are bought and sold with money.

Where did the money come from? Indian industrialists knew that people in India wanted a change. They were divided 40% for ruling UPA coalition and 60% for BJP led NDA coalition. They did not provide the overwhelming money to Congress party. Then who gave? Who provided in excess of 50000 crores of rupees to bring a win for the Congress party in such a land slide manner? It was done in a two prong way. First, Congress party spent heavily and in pin pointed fashion to topple certain electoral seats. But CIA performed the other side. Why did Advani deliberately lead BJP to disaster? The answer lies in how the BJP Members of the Parliaments were bought in open market by some unknown characters to win the nuke deal with America. The BJP infrastructure from the top to the bottom was bought out to lose the election. Common people in India are stunned for the first time. They know they did not want Sonia Gandhi and company. They just could not find any alternative.

One way to influence and make political party win is to spend and buy out the other side. That can result in total landslide victory.

Most of Indian politicians run in elections to win and then make some money trading their influences. Money is the motive after all. If these politicians are told, you can have the money and do something else, what do you expect?

BJP was bought out. Small opposition parties were told to sit tight in exchange of big bucks. People just could not find a viable opposition party to vote for. Indian democracy was bribed. Indian Parliament is now a slave of foreign power. The opposition parties other than the communists are dormant. Even the communists are in total shock.

History may have repeated. India lost its independence again. Two hundred and fifty years back East India Company snatched Indian sovereignty in the Battle of Palasey. Mirjafar, the chief military commander of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-Ud-Dullah, was bribed by the British to lose a battle deliberately. Mirjafar, an Arab by birth, he rose to power in the Nawab's army and in the battle of Plassey (1756) he conspired with the British to depose Siraj-Ud-Dullah to become the Nawab himself. Mir had secretly made a pact with British to overthrow Siraj in lieu of the promise that he would make the Nawab of Bengal.

The British force under Robert Clive marched to Murshidabad and met Siraj in the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Mir's army betrayed Siraj by not fighting for him and Siraj was defeated and killed. Mir was crowned as the new Nawab of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal.

Sonia Gandhi, an Italian may be the new Mirjafar. History may have repeated again.

The biggest question is: we know what happened to India in years after the battle of Palasey. What will happen to India now and in the next twenty years?

http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/20569.asp

[Guest]

<b>The most bogus election</b>

The most famous rigged elections in India’s history are probably the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly polls. Though the electoral malpractices impacted just 15-18 assembly constituencies out of a total 76, they destroyed the credibility of chief minister Farooq Abdullah (note: this columnist authored Dr Farooq’s biography), and though there is no official record of any electoral fraud, it is by now an article of truth in New Delhi that this bogus election caused the secessionist insurgency that still requires the deployment of half a million soldiers in J&K. This causality is too tidy an explanation of a festering political problem and doesn’t answer one question: if rigged elections caused separatism, then why haven’t the genuine elections of 2002 wiped separatism out? Anyway, the point is not to quibble over Kashmir’s problems, but to underline that though there is no official record of fraud, pick up any book about Kashmir problem and it will mention the 1987 elections as rigged.

The 2009 Lok Sabha polls in Tamil Nadu were not rigged but purchased. No prizes for guessing by whom. Cost estimates run around Rs 1,000 crore; the talk is that approximately Rs 600 crore contributed by “A. King”, the rest by a man who even our mild-mannered prime minister wants to keep at arm’s length. Sources say the operation to purchase voters began on May 10, and continued till the last vote was cast on May 13. But let’s face it, no crime has been committed; if the voters don’t mind being bribed, then case closed (except for in one constituency where votes were counted, recounted and recounted before everyone was allowed to return Home. It stank of something stronger than just bribing voters).

Yet it is something that rankles the losers, though no one is speaking about this publicly because one, they’re in a state of shock, and two, they know that the chief minister, Mr Kalaignar, will simply stick his tongue out at them and snigger “sour grapes”. Some in the opposition have raised doubts about the reliability of electronic voting machines, but not to any effect.

Opposition politicians are not the only ones startled by the results. One newspaper baron, a recent target of Mr Kalaignar’s ire, averred on TV that a high turnout in Tamil Nadu meant a strong anti-incumbency wave. He further predicted that the ruling alliance in the state would lose over half its seats. This provoked loutish comments from one soon-to-be textile minister. Another channel featured exit polls conducted by Yogendra Yadav that were openly met with scepticism by the channel’s southern political editor. His public disagreement with his editor-in-chief was reckless – unless he was absolutely certain he was correct. Even Rahul Gandhi, whose political gambits have paid rich dividends, told the press his party would not mind tying up with the AIADMK post-elections. He obviously believed the DMK was going down. It is ironic that a man was wrong about a state with only 39 seats but correct about a state with 80 seats.

More important than how the DMK confounded everyone’s expectations is how no one got wise to the money being spent even though one of the earliest irregularities detected in TN was the Rs 500-note-in-the-mail. The EC took action against some low-level cut-outs, but the real beneficiaries presumably laughed their way to Rashtrapati Bhawan. The state’s chief electoral officer deserves the highest praise for such vigilance, for ensuring a level playing field, and for keeping the electorate’s faith in democracy.

Those who despair about what this means for democracy should take solace in the situation in my home state Bihar, which was once upon a time synonymous with booth-capturing, voter-impersonation and all-round muscle-power during elections. No one ever believed Bihar would get good governance, but times have changed and the days of muscle-power have passed. Bihar finally got good governance and the voters gave their stamp of endorsement in these elections. The dominance of money-power too shall pass and perhaps sooner than you think, considering two events this week.

One was M K Stalin’s promotion as deputy chief minister. Coming a day after M K Azhagiri’s induction into the UPA Cabinet, this is seen as a balancing act between Mr Kalaignar’s two sons. However, Stalin himself says it’s because his dad is ill. Ever since the Tiruchy election rally which sent Mr Kalaignar to the ICU, the old man has not been himself. Nowadays his health is fragile and he is said to find even conversation with officials difficult. He was too frail to fight for the portfolios and ministers he wanted. In Delhi he met only two Congress leaders, one of whom is The Trouble-Shooter and who curtly made the party’s take-it-or-leave-it offer on number of berths and portfolios before politely rushing off for A Pressing Engagement. 2009 is no 2004, and the old man could do nothing about it.

Mr Kalaignar is preparing for his last bow and once he passes from the scene, warring factions in the family/DMK will use their stash not for the purpose of winning elections, but against one another to seize control of the party. No matter who comes out on top, all will come out damaged and debilitated, and then they will have to deal with the real threat to the family’s future: Rahul Gandhi, a man who (in the other event of the week, the Cabinet expansion) openly declared his intention of reviving the party in TN.

Somehow, you can’t help but feel that without Mr Kalaignar around, Rahul Gandhi is bound to meet with more success going at it alone in TN than he did even in UP. And with his party controlling the central government, it is unlikely that any amount of money-power by you-know-who will make a difference in the elections. So the phase of money-power in elections too shall come to pass, as will the phase of politics in Tamil Nadu based on bitter polarisations.

Immediately after the 1987 J&K elections, no one would have predicted the kind of violence that would soon engulf the state. Tamil Nadu has a different set of circumstances, and the consequences of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections in the state will obviously be different, but there will be consequences, even if they’re of the “He who lives by the money-power dies by the money-power” variety. And thus, like the 1987 J&K elections, these 2009 TN elections will become a part of folklore and faith as being one of the most bogus elections in Indian history.

About The Author:
Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai

http://expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?...AA84nwcg==&SEO=

[Guest]

<b>Europe Rejects Electronic Voting Machines </b>

When Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme in 2006 that would dispense with "stupid old pencils," 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 €51 million later, in April, the government scrapped the entire initiative. High costs were one concern—finishing the project would take another €28 million. But what doomed the effort was a lack of trust: the electorate just didn't like that the machines would record their votes as mere electronic blips, with no tangible record.

One doesn't 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. We take on this security risk in banking, shopping and e-mailing, but the ballot box must be perfectly sealed. At least that's 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, Germany's 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 Chávez won the 2004 election in Venezuela, it came out that the government owned 28 percent of Bizta, the company that manufactured the voting machines. Similarly, the 2004 elections in India were notorious for gangs stuffing electronic ballot boxes in villages.

Why are the machines so vulnerable? Each step in the life cycle of a voting machine—from the time it is developed and installed to when the votes are recorded and the data transferred to a central repository for tallying—involves different people gaining access to the machines, often installing new software. It wouldn't be hard for, say, an election official to plant a "Trojan" 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 wouldn't 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 doesn't help that the software often runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is not the world's 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 U.S. 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.

He'd 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. At the moment, there's very little to like about it.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/199102?tid=relatedcl

[Guest]

AryanK,
Look for Ambani links. Which company had provided hardware and software and support to EVM.
Ambani after election closed, met Queen and others.
Now Government is coming out with new fuel policy which will help Reliance Company.

Lets hope one Babu had real awaking and tell the world, I will pray for his/her life.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Remote Controlling EVM – Manufacturing Election Result
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Very simple to do, as they do here driving inside car and scan for mobile net connection.

[Guest]

<b>Italy calls halt to electronic voting</b>

The Italian Minister of the Interior, Giulano Amato has announced that following pilots the government has decided not to pursue electronic voting any further.

"We decided to stop the electronic voting machine [...] During the 2006 elections we experimented with the machines as a voting system, and not a system that counts the sections, without any reference to the legally valid votes. Now that we arrived at the point in which we decide to continue, passing from the experimental phase to the implementation, using the machines for the counting as well, it is obvious: we decided to stop. It is a suggestion that came from the ministerial offices, I presented it to Prodi expressing my opinion as well, the Premier agreed. It will be the triumph of our ancestors, but for someone of my generation it isn't unpleasant either. Let's stick to voting and counting physically because less easy to falsify" (Source)

This is fantastic news for Italians and for all of us around the world trying to prevent the introduction of e-voting. In the space of a month the Canadian province of Quebec has introduced an indefinite moratorium on e-voting, the Netherlands have withdrawn all of a specific model e-voting machine and now Italy have called a halt to e-voting. Is the tide turning?

Following up on the earlier claims that the Italian general election could have been rigged, the journalists behind the allegations are now being investigated for publishing false information. Whether the allegations themselves are being properly investigated isn't clear - there seems to be a lot of recrimination at the moment and little in the way of facts.

http://www.jasonkitcat.com/h/f/JDOM/blog//1//?be_id=320

[Guest]

<b>Electronic Voting - A challenge to Democracy? </b>

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/wp-content/...-pack-final.pdf

[Guest]

<b>Dangers of Electronic Voting</b>

<b>Did your vote really count in the last election---you never know!</b>

<img src='http://www.keralamonitor.com/gifs/evm.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

It is a fact that the election results announced on May 16 surprised the entire nation and proved all exit pollsters wrong. It is difficult to assume that all the post election exit polls can be proved equally wrong. While the exit polls predicted a hung parliament, the election result gave a clear majority to the ruling party. Is there a possibility that the exit polls represented the actual voting pattern and political mood in the country and that the election results announced on by counting the electronic votes recorded by the EVMs was due to a silent coup using the machines manufactured and handled by the countries largest defence electronic firms --Bharat Electronics Ltd and (Bel) the Electronic Corporation of India LTD (ECIL), Both the defence units are part of Indian military industrial complex, which do not have much reputation for transparency.

<img src='http://www.keralamonitor.com/gifs/rajashekhar%20evm.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

The recent Indian Parliament election is noted for the crucial role of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) in the fast and efficient conduct of the voting process. The largest democracy in the world used 1.5 million EVMS manufactured by two defence electronic units and monitored by the Election Commission of India. The reputation of indigenous EVMs are upheld by the government officials and the mainstream media alike, and an ongoing debate in the Western countries, bastions of parliamentary democracy, about the use and misuse of electronic voting don't find much space in the Indian visual or print media.

It is a fact that the election results announced on May 16 surprised the entire nation and proved all exit pollsters wrong. It is difficult to assume that all the post election exit polls can be proved equally wrong. While the exit polls predicted a hung parliament, the election result gave a clear majority to the ruling party. Is there a possibility that the exit polls represented the actual voting pattern and political mood in the country and that the election results announced by counting the electronic votes recorded by the EVMs was due to a silent coup using the machines manufactured and handled by the countries largest defence electronic firms --Bharat Electronics Ltd and (Bel) the Electronic Corporation of India LTD (ECIL), Both the defence units are part of Indian military industrial complex, which do not have much reputation for transparency. While the power tussle between the incoming and outgoing election commissioners, pro-BJP Gopalaswami and pro Congress Navin Chawla, was widely reported in the national media, a silent leadership change in both the defence electronic units largely remained outside the focus of mainstream Indian media. (box) --(Features of Electronic Voting Machines--Source India Election Commission)

A major flaw in the working of EVM is that the election results cannot be physically verified as the digital system leaves no paper trail. Allover the world, especially in the USA, experts are questioning legitimacy of flawed digital voting system and demanding governments to introduce Voter Verified Paper Records. In the Indian electronic voting machine system, as in some other countries, there is no paper record of the votes and a voter cannot verify the accuracy of the digital record before casting his vote. Some Experts have hinted at major flaws in the indigenous electronic voting process that leaves an ordinary voter absolutely in the dark whether his e-vote is "really" recorded in the account of his favourite candidate. Media reports from certain constituencies in Kerala and other states indicated that the voting machines were recording votes cast in the name of one candidate in the account of rival candidates! Was it just the tip of an ice berg or isolated incidents due to technical glitches? Nothing more is heard about the faulty rigged EVMs that were recording votes cast in the name of one candidate going to the rival candidates and only time will reveal the reality. The UPA alliance low moral standing was exposed during the "note for vote" drama staged in the Indian Parliament during the no confidence motion after the left parties withdrew support in the name of Indo-USA Nuclear deal. (K S Rajasekhara Rao, who superannuated on 30th April..2009 former Chairman & Managing Director of Electronics Corporation of India Limited, Hyderabad, Examining EVMs__courtesy the Hindu)

While nothing is heard about the reasons for such malfunctioning or rigged electronic voting machines there is ample reason to argue that everything was not fair with the use of 1.5 million EVMs in Indian elections for the 49th Parliamentary Election, which was crucial for many reasons. The EVMS made by two defence companies in India under the strict government control and their source codes and technical details are not revealed to the public.. EVM Malfunctioning was reported in other states too. Was there a big fraud involving the Indian Government machinery to rig the elections in favour of the ruling party? There are enough reasons to suspect so. The EVM process codes, not so open to the media or independent verification can easily be manipulated...Such large scale rigging of electronic voting machines did happen in the US during the November 2004 reelection of George W. Bush. Some other European countries too are not using electronic voting machines for obvious reasons.. A leading politician had in fact demonstrated how an EVM can be fudged in favour of one candidate against the rest (Read How to Tampter with voting machines (Right top column)

The EVM officials claim that the machines are smarter than the previous versions and records the votes with exact time that the voter cast his or her vote. Since 2000 the Bharat Electronics Ltd (Bhel) supplied 650,000 EVMS and for the 2009 elections it made 102,000 EVMs, all supplied by January 2009. Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL) Hydrabad supplied 78,000 machines with the improved features.

<b>Features of Electronic Voting Machines</b>

http://www.keralamonitor.com/gifs/EVM_Features.pdf

[Guest]

<b>What's Wrong With Electronic Voting Machines?</b>

By Bruce Schneier

In the aftermath of the American presidential election on 2 November 2004, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerised machines lost votes, subtracted votes, and doubled some votes too. And because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted.

While it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of this presidential election, the internet is buzzing with rumours and allegations in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual state's election, but the next few weeks will reveal whether any of the information crystallises into something significant.

The US has been here before. After the 2000 election, voting-machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn't mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples' trust in their accuracy.
This is difficult, but not impossible.

Before I discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. In my view, a voting system has four required characteristics:
Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else's vote, stuff ballots, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.

Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.

Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. Nearly 120 million people voted in the US presidential election. About 372 million people voted in India's May 2004 national elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October 2004 local elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike in many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election decisions: national, local, and everything in between.

Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime.

Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and potshards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch-cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerised voting machines promise even more efficiency, and internet voting even more convenience.

But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, say, a punch-card reader. It's not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into appropriately counted votes.

Trust a computer to be inaccurate
Technology gets in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot, to ovals, to optical reader, to vote tabulator, to centralised total.

At each step, errors can occur. If the ballot is confusing, some voters will fill in the wrong ovals. If a voter doesn't fill them in properly, or if the reader is malfunctioning, then the sensor won't sense the ovals properly. Mistakes in tabulation -- either in the machine or when machine totals get aggregated into larger totals -- also cause errors.

A manual system of tallying the ballots by hand, and then doing it again to double-check, is more accurate simply because there are fewer steps.
The error rates in modern systems can be significant. Some voting technologies have a 5% error rate, which means one in twenty people who vote using the system don't have their votes counted. A system like this operates under the assumption that most of the time the errors don't matter. If you consider that the errors are uniformly distributed -- in other words, that they affect each candidate with equal probability -- then they won't affect the final outcome except in very close races.

So we're willing to sacrifice accuracy to get a voting system that will handle large and complicated elections more quickly.
In close races, errors can affect the outcome, and that's the point of a recount. A recount is an alternate system of tabulating votes: one that is slower (because it's manual), simpler (because it just focuses on one race), and therefore more accurate.

Note that this is only true if everyone votes using the same machines. If parts of a town that tend to support candidate A use a voting system with a higher error rate than the voting system used in parts of town that tend to support candidate B, then the results will be skewed against candidate A.
With this background, the problem with computerised voting machines becomes clear. Actually, "computerised voting machines" is a bad choice of words. Many of today's mechanical voting technologies involve computers too. Computers tabulate both punch-card and optical-scan machines.

The current debate centres on all-computer voting systems, primarily touch-screen systems, called Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines (the voting system used in India's May 2004 election -- a computer with a series of buttons -- is subject to the same issues).

In these systems the voter is presented with a list of choices on a screen, perhaps multiple screens if there are multiple elections, and he indicates his choice by touching the screen. As Daniel Tokaji points out, these machines are easy to use, produce final tallies immediately after the polls close, and can handle very complicated elections. They can also display instructions in different languages and allow for the blind or otherwise handicapped to vote without assistance.

They're also more error-prone. The very same software that makes touch-screen voting systems so friendly also makes them inaccurate in the worst possible way.
'Bugs' or errors in software are commonplace, as any computer user knows. Computer programs regularly malfunction, sometimes in surprising and subtle ways. This is true for all software, including the software in computerised voting machines.

For example:
In Fairfax County, Virginia in 2003, a programming error in the electronic-voting machines caused them to mysteriously subtract 100 votes from one candidate's totals.

In a 2003 election in Boone County, Iowa the electronic vote-counting equipment showed that more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the municipal elections, even though only half of the county's 50,000 residents were eligible to vote.
In San Bernardino County, California in 2001, a programming error caused the computer to look for votes in the wrong portion of the ballot in 33 local elections, which meant that no votes registered on those ballots for that election. A recount was done by hand.

In Volusia County, Florida in 2000, an electronic voting machine gave Al Gore a final vote count of negative 16,022 votes.
There are literally hundreds of similar stories.
What's important about these problems is not that they resulted in a less accurate tally, but that the errors were not uniformly distributed; they affected one candidate more than the other. This is evidence that you can't assume errors will cancel each other out; you have to assume that any error will skew the results significantly and affect the result of the election.

And then there's security
Another issue is that software can be 'hacked'. That is, someone can deliberately introduce an error that modifies the result in favour of his preferred candidate.
This has nothing to do with whether the voting machines are hooked up to the internet on election day, as Daniel Tokaji seems to believe. The threat is that the computer code could be modified while it is being developed and tested, either by one of the programmers or a hacker who gains access to the voting-machine company's network. It's much easier to surreptitiously modify a software system than a hardware system, and it's much easier to make these modifications undetectable.

Malicious changes or errors in the software can have far-reaching effects. A problem with a manual machine just affects that machine. A software problem, whether accidental or intentional, can affect many thousands of machines and skew the results of an entire election.

Some have argued in favour of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerised financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity.

Computerised financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn't possible.

None of this means that we should abandon touch-screen voting; the benefits of DRE machines are too great to throw away. But it does mean that we need to recognise the limitations, and design systems that can be accurate despite them.
Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do (some voting experts disagree, but it is the computer security experts who need to be listened to; the problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application). They have two recommendations, echoed by Siva Vaidhyanathan:

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.
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).

Computerised systems with these characteristics won't be perfect -- no piece of software is -- but they'll be much better than what we have now. We need to treat voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system.

The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the US is significantly more meticulous than that applied to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.

Proponents of DREs often point to successful elections as "proof" that the systems work. That completely misses the point. The fear is that errors in the software -- either accidental or deliberately introduced -- can undetectably alter the final tallies. An election without any detected problems is no more a proof that the system is reliable and secure, than a night that no one broke into your house is proof that your locks work. Maybe no one tried to break in, or maybe someone tried and succeeded -- and you don't know it.

Even if we get the technology right, we still won't be finished. If the goal of a voting system is to accurately translate voter intent into a final tally, the voting machine itself is only one part of the overall system. In the 2004 US election, problems with voter registration, untrained poll workers, ballot design, and procedures for handling problems, resulted in far more votes being left uncounted than problems with technology.

If we're going to spend money on new voting technology, it makes sense to spend it on technology that makes the problem easier instead of harder.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-068.html

[Guest]

<b>How to tamper with voting machines!</b>

Chandigarh, March 11
Can electronic voting machines (EVMs) be tampered with?

<img src='http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010312/2lead.gif' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Capt Amarinder Singh demonstrates how a “fudged electronic voting machine” works. — A Tribune photo by Parvesh Chauhan

“Yes”, says Mr Amarinder Singh, president, Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee, supporting his assertion by giving a demonstration of how an EVM with a cleverly programmed chip installed in it can transfer votes polled by one candidate to another leaving no remnants of the original voting pattern.

“Convinced that these EVMs can be manipulated, we are going to make a presentation to the Chief Election Commissioner, Dr Manohar Singh Gill, in New Delhi next week and request him to revert to the original system of voting using ballot papers. If the commission does not listen to us, we will have no choice but to knock at the door of the judiciary to get EVMs out of the elections,” asserts Mr Amarinder Singh.

Mr Amarinder Singh carries a set of EVMs, including the control unit, which during elections remains with the presiding officer of a polling station, and gives a “demonstration of how the programmed chip transfers the votes of one candidate to another”.

“We got suspicious about what we call ‘sophisticated booth capturing’ when we found that there was 129 per cent increase in the votebank of Akalis at Nawanshahr, 100 per cent at Sunam and now 65 per cent at Majitha. The ruling party did well wherever EVMs were used while at other places, we did well. This we did by analysing all elections in the state since 1997,” says the PPCC chief, admitting that “my wife and Mr Jagmeet Singh Brar were elected to the Lok Sabha from constituencies where EVMs were used. But till that time, for the ruling Akali Dal, EVMs were something new and unique.

“But once they put their electronics experts on the job, they could immediately find a solution. Whatever the Election Commission says about EVMs is not true. The mother boards, after being removed from the EVMs, do not crash but work perfectly after being soldered back in the machine. Similarly, wave welding, which the Election Commission maintains is not available in India, is very much available at various places in the country,” asserts the Punjab Congress chief.

“We put our hardware and software experts on the job. They not only came out with different programmed chips but also revealed how these EVMs had been condemned the world over. Many countries, including Germany, France and the UK, had gone back to the conventional ballot paper polling by discarding the EVMs,” he said before giving a demonstration of how an EVM with a programmed chip installed in it “works wonders”.

“A programmed chip will not cost much. It is both timed and programmed to convert the votes polled by one candidate to those of another. It is only the final position that will remain on the hardchip or all three memories, thus leaving no scope for anyone to find out the original pattern of voting,” he says during the demonstration. “Seventeen votes are cast of which three go to candidate number 1, one each to candidates number two and three, 11 to candidate number 5 and one to candidate number 7. And after a while, when the votes are counted, the machine gives 13 votes to candidate number 1 and four to candidate number 2 and nothing to the rest.

“So each machine can be programmed to transfer, say, every third vote polled by the Congress to the Shiromani Akali Dal. In the Chamunda Devi area, which is a traditional Congress stronghold, our candidate lost during the recent Majitha Assembly byelection. This strengthens our conviction that EVMs were programmed.

“Let bygone be bygone. We do not want this ‘sophisticated booth-capturing’ to continue anymore. We do not want EVMs but want that in all future elections in Punjab the conventional ballot paper should be used.

“The EVMs remain in the custody of the government, thus leaving scope for their manipulation. We had requested the Election Commission that if it wants to use EVMs in Majitha, let it bring EVMs from any other state and use them. But our suggestion was turned down and the EVMs already with the election tehsildars in Punjab were used,” he added.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010312/main4.htm

[Guest]

<b>Large Scale Reshuffle of Officials Before Elections</b>

<img src='http://www.keralamonitor.com/gifs/evmvoting.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

Immediately before the election, the ECO decided to reshuffle the senior government officials controlling election process in each state and union territories. S K Rudola, Secretary, ECI convened a meeting of all the Chief Secretaries and Director Generals of Police in each state and union territories to review election preparedness and security arrangements for the polls.

"The Commission directed that no efforts should be spared to conduct free and fair elections. The Commission directed the States and Union Territories to ensure that all officials who have been posted at one place for more than 3 years in the last 4 years, or those who are posted in their home districts, should be immediately transferred out, and compliance report sent by 28th February, 2009," said a press statement issued by the Secretary on February 5, 2009. (Navin Chawla, Chief Election Commissioner --right N Gopalaswami -shunted out of ECI in the middle of electioneering)

The Commission also directed that all critical posts from the point of view of conduct of elections be filled up on priority basis by 20th February, 2009. Was it only to ensure "free and fair elections" that massive transfers and reshuffles exercise just before the election? Along with a change at the top level in ECI, there was a total reshuffle of the election machinery in the months before the polls. In addition, part of the crucial election related IT work was outsourced and temporary computer programmers were selected to write. To strengthen its IT set up, the commission has appointed several temporary computer programmers "to write code for .NET framework and Oracle/SQL server for software designed for ECI. The use of digital signature certificates for government officials.

The counting of electronic voting was conducted in such a manner to hide booth wise voting pattern, ostensibly to prevent post-election "intimidation and victimization" of voters. What is the big danger if the booth wise voting pattern is known? First election in India using EVMs throughout the country had extensive security measures in place for EVMs -leaving the key with government officials. ""Keys of the EVM strong room should be in safe custody with the RO/DEO. The candidates should be allowed to put their own seal on the strong room". "A control room is opened in the premises from where watch may be kept on the strong room security".

[Guest]

<b><span style='color:blue'>Italy calls halt to electronic voting</span></b>
November 30, 2006 8:16 pm in voting, Related Articles

The Italian Minister of the Interior, Giulano Amato has announced that following pilots the government has decided not to pursue electronic voting any further.

"We decided to stop the electronic voting machine [...] During the 2006 elections we experimented with the machines as a voting system, and not a system that counts the sections, without any reference to the legally valid votes. Now that we arrived at the point in which we decide to continue, passing from the experimental phase to the implementation, using the machines for the counting as well, it is obvious: we decided to stop. It is a suggestion that came from the ministerial offices, I presented it to Prodi expressing my opinion as well, the Premier agreed. It will be the triumph of our ancestors, but for someone of my generation it isn't unpleasant either. Let's stick to voting and counting physically because less easy to falsify" (Source)

This is fantastic news for Italians and for all of us around the world trying to prevent the introduction of e-voting. In the space of a month the Canadian province of Quebec has introduced an indefinite moratorium on e-voting, the Netherlands have withdrawn all of a specific model e-voting machine and now Italy have called a halt to e-voting. Is the tide turning?

Following up on the earlier claims that the Italian general election could have been rigged, the journalists behind the allegations are now being investigated for publishing false information. Whether the allegations themselves are being properly investigated isn't clear - there seems to be a lot of recrimination at the moment and little in the way of facts.

(Thanks to Emanuele and The Open Rights Group for the links)

http://www.jasonkit cat.com/h/ f/JDOM/blog/ /1//?be_id= 320

[Guest]

<b><span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>EVMs are not tamper-proof

</b></span>
<b>* Jayalalithaa, Chandrababu Naidu want to return to ballot papers.
* In Orissa, parties are approaching EC with dozens of complaints.
* Nowhere in Europe or US are EVMs used.</b>


By Dr Subramanian Swamy

JUNE 07, 2009

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.

Now Madras High Court is hearing a PIL on the EVMs. This is a good news. I believe time has arrived for taking a long, hard look at these riggable machines that favour the ruling party 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.

There is much talk today about the possibility of rigging of the electoral outcome 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 these doubts are accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals as also in the popular international press which raises 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: “Trustworthy Voting” 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 protecting the integrity of the outcome. 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 Morozov, 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 didn’t like that the machines would record their votes as mere electronic blips, with no tangible record.

Morozov points out that one doesn’t 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 “e-coup d’etat”. At least that’s 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, Germany’s 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 per cent 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— from the time it is developed and installed to when the votes are recorded and the data transferred to a central repository for tallying—involves different people gaining access to the machines, often installing a new software. It wouldn’t 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 MS 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 VN 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 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 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 wouldn’t 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 programmes that run them are usually closely held trade secrets (it doesn’t help that the software often runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is not the world’s 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 US 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 a good news. I believe time has arrived for taking a long, hard look at these riggable machines that favour the ruling party 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 now be 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 recognised party finds that more than 10 per cent of the polling booths showed less than five votes per booth, should be taken prima facie a constituency in which rigging has taken place. This is because the main recognised parties usually have more than five 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 give affidavits affirming who they had voted for, then the High Court can treat it as evidence and order a full inquiry.

(The writer is a former Union Law Minister.)

http://www.organise r.org/dynamic/ modules.php? name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=294&page=2