Paper trail EVMs are no guard against tampering
Changes in software and inspections by political parties will help restore faith in the voting mechanism
After the farcical demonstration on a dummy in the Delhi Assembly, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal reportedly said: “Give me the EVM for 90 seconds and I’ll change the mother board.” It is akin to asking in case of voting by paper ballot: Give me the ballot box for 90 seconds and I’ll stuff it with ballots stamped in my favour.
Fortunately, the system evolved by the Election Commission (EC) ensures that no unauthorised person ever handles the EVM. I had raised the red flag in 2009 on EVMs because our study revealed that, despite all the precautions and checks prescribed by the EC, the possibility of tampering exists.
The ‘mind’ of the machine is the chip on which is a programme which controls the machine. The programme is neither written by EC officers nor is the programme ‘fused’ to the chip in their presence. Having public sector companies writing it is no safeguard since ultimately a minister can control them. Moreover, since the programme is fused abroad and it is ‘unreadable’ once fused, how can the Election Commission be sure that a ‘trojan’ programme hasn’t been written instead?
The ‘trojan’ programme can remain dormant when various checks are being carried in the presence of the parties and candidates and can be activated, let us say, at the time of voting or counting. It will follow the commands of a ‘controller’ who can then rig the polling in whichever way he likes. It is not relevant that our EVMs are ‘standalone’ machines: the ‘trojan’ programme can be activated by remote control means, as I’ve demonstrated in various forums.
I’m glad that since then a number of safeguards have been introduced, especially the gradual introduction of the VVPAT (Voter verified voter audited trail, better known as ‘paper trail’). All EVMs in the recently-held Goa assembly polls and 35 randomly selected constituencies out of 117 in Punjab had VVPATs. Out of the 42.64 lakh votes polled in 35 constituencies with VVPAT in Punjab, AAP got 10.54 lakh and the INC 22.41 lakh; this means that the AAP got 24.7% and INC 42.6%. In all 117 constituencies, out of 154.4 lakh votes cast, AAP got 36.6 lakh and the INC 59.5 lakh; this is 23.7% for AAP and 38.5% for the INC respectively. I do not find the difference statistically significant to indicate any major fraud.
In my letter to then chief election commissioner SY Quraishi in 2010, I had suggested that the existing chip be replaced with another chip with an ‘embedded one-time programmable (OTP) non-volatile memory’ and then get a ‘sentry’ programme fused into the chip. By enabling parties to ‘check sentry software through an open standard specification’, it will generate confidence and also fulfil essential conditions of ‘public scrutiny of elections’.