Slashdot Mirror
India Chooses All-Electronic Voting
MaximusTheGreat writes "While the U.S. debates the merits of e-voting, India has decided to have all electronic polls in the next elections for its billion strong population. Though India has used e-voting partially in previous elections, it will be the first time a Lok Sabha (central parliament) election will be held in the country since 1952 without the use of ballot papers. Election Commission plans to use about 800,000 electronic voting machines. Also, taking note from India's experience, other commonwealth countries like Malaysia and Britain will be sending representatives to India to see the use of EVMs during the Assembly elections. On a related note they plan to make voter's identity card mandatory for voting."
Yes - the marks would last for upto two weeks on honest fingers but crooked politicians and their crafty supporters had developed numerous ways to erase them quickly so they could go back and vote again and again.
Sometimes something as simple as rubbing a peeled potato skin on the fingernail would be enough to erase the mark. I never had the opportunity (or the motivation) to try this but I have this from "reliable sources.."!!
These identity cards will certainly reduce instances of fraudulent voting - and as for privacy concerns - in a country like India with all those other concerns - the cost-benefit just doesn't work out in favour of privacy (and I am talking of the cost-benefit for the man on the street - not for the govt.)
AC
Elections in India are generally marvellous exercises in democracy. In national elections, hundreds of millions of people of many different kinds cast their votes and elect their representatives. Many people doubted whether democracy would flourish in India, but they are proved wrong after every election. However, the fact still remains that there are still a lot of irregularities in the electoral process.
The bulk of the states have generally free and fair elections. The poorest states, especially those in the North, do not. There, the local strongmen actively use force to swing voted to their side and in a lot of constituencies it is not the most popular candidate who wins, but the most popular. In the poorest of the poor states, this fraud happens on a very large scale.
Today, vote rigging is a very simple exercise. All you have to do is get a bunch of very strong men with weapons of some kind and visit each polling station one by one, threaten the officers there and stamp the ballot papers in your favor. The more organized efforts include printing fake ballot papers and having them counted.
Now that EVMs have been introduced, the potential for localized fraud will be several restricted in some ways. Fake ballot papers cannot be printed, votes cannot be changed or removed. However, the local strong men and criminalized parties will still be around. They will still be able to threaten/cajole/buy people and subvert the democratic process. These problems are more systemic and will solve themselves with the passage of time.
Centralized election fraud is a very different matter. On paper, it looks like EVMs can take care of it. The results of "electronic" elections can be easily verified repeatedly and it should be somewhat difficult to systematically rig EVMS. I'm sure that people will find some way of manipulating EVMs, but it shouldn't knew the results much.
Finally, EVMs have delivered a lot of tangible results in India already. For example, results have been tabulated almost instantly, considerably shortening the political and economic uncertainty associated with elections. They definitely help democracy at every level in India.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
Ok!! This is an older story from March'2001.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010312/main4.ht m
How to tamper with voting machines!
Prabhjot Singh
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, March 11
Can electronic voting machines (EVMs) be tampered with?
"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.
Capt Amarinder Singh demonstrates how a "fudged electronic voting machine" works. -- A Tribune photo by Parvesh Chauhan
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 el
I will try to remove some misunderstanding about the voter's ID card and the voting machine --
1) The cost of Voter's ID card is paid by the govt. Individual voters do not pay anything. I just had to go to a temporary office in my locality to get photographed and pick it up in about 10 minutes. So, the 0.75 USD discrimination problem that you point out is non-existent.
2) The voting machines simply record the number of votes for each candidate, and no record is created about who voted for whom
3) Election commision in India is an independent constitutional body and has been know to re-conduct the elections in voting areas with slightest hint of fraud.
4) Each voting booth in India is allowed to have has one representative from each candidate to ensure that the other candidate does not tryto defraud the voter. This is not perfect but ensures that the fraud when it happens does not skew the result too much.
5) The voting machines contain no OS. The code is in assembly in tamper proof chips, making it very hard to hack
6) The voting machines are not linked together over a network. This implies that to tally votes the machine has to be taken to a central station where again representatives from each candidate ensure that no wholscale fraud takes place.
just some statistics for those who care (from the cia world fact book).
India
Population - 1,045,845,226
Population below poverty line - 25%
Unemployment - 8.8%
Military Expenditure - $12,079.7 million ( 2.5% of gdp)
US
Population - 280,562,489
Population below poverty line - 13%
Unemployment - 5%
Military Expenditure - $276.7 billion ( 3.2% of gdp)