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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."
Therefore there was no need for any ID Cards. Sigh, practical technology being replaced with technology that infringes on freedoms.
Saves a lot of money, the technology and hardware is indigenous, no additional security issues as compared to the ballot-box-ink-paper technique etc.
All in all, a sensible decision. The voter electronic id-cards are also almost completed - about 75 cents a card. When that gets fully completed, elections in the biggest democracy in the world can be conducted smoothly.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Who will do the tech support for the voting machines?
India is holding their entire election online, and I can't even get cable modem service in Silicon Valley. Christ almighty.
While the U.S. debates the merits of e-voting
... "India is pushing ahead and leaving the USA behind". Actually, it is a fine idea to debate the merits before taking a big risk on the key process in democracy.
... electronic voting has not been trialled on anything remotely this big. AFAIK no city/state/province has run an all-electronic election, let alone an entire country. Great initiative, plenty for everyone to learn from, but seems just a bit dangerous.
This makes it sound like a bad thing
I'm surprised India is doing this
BTW Does this mean the end of election night coverage?
(End of day, sorry you lose,hasta la vista)
First off, this election will generate a"vote-databases" larger than about any other election on this planet. Given that about a billion people live in India, there will be hundreds of millions of votes. Although electronic voting is nothing new (in the Netherlands the elections are almost 100% electronic for years now), the sheer scale of this electronic election makes it interesting.
But exactly how many people eligible for voting are there? Obviously, a significant number of the about 1 billion inhabitants will be under the legal voting age.
And then, how about the caste system? Please note that I'm not trying to be a troll here: I know the caste system doesn't officially exist anymore, but I've been in India for work for a month, and I found it pretty clear that people from different castes are treated differently. Are people from the lowests castes (or the caste-less) discouraged from voting in any way? And does the mandatory presentation of an ID-card prevent many of these people from voting?
Is there anyone who can provide a decent, and honest, background on this? It is an interesting sociological issue.
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They propose to make having voting cards mandatory even if all voters do not get the cards. This could be a cause for concern if there are hassles getting the cards. I would like to know the reason only 65% of voters have a card. Is there any way to get a card on the day or is there a cutoff?
Voting is voluntary in India (source: Subas Pani, Deputy Election Commissioner, Election Commission of India, subaspani(a)eci.gov.in) so I guess it doesn't matter much.
They have only 1500 voters at each polling station so vote rigging is kind of limited in effect (there are always ways and means I realise).
I'm interested to see how this goes for them.
I don't understand the Americans. They have more people living in poverty than there are people in Spain, yet they build nukes and spend tons of money so they can live on the bleeding edge of [insert thing here].
So what the FUCK is your point?
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Funny, a lot of people in the world look at the U.S and think the same thing. No universial health care!? No free university!? High school students who can't read!? Weird.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
So either we're talking some other country or you just pulled that one out of a hat.
Oddly enough, I'm Indian, so don't take my opinion as too slanted.
.. more accuracy and probably less corruption, but the poor people need in. It's their country too.
Anyhow, let me start by saying that this is a very thrilling next step in India's experiment with democracy. It'll be awesome to see the elections being conducted with minimal fraud (hopefully combated with the ID cards), but I see a very serious problem.
0.75 USD is the equivalent of about Rs. 30, and in a country where the Rs. 30 can buy a gourmet meal for 5 (well, I'm exagerating, but please try to see my point), it strikes me as quite a price for a vote. See, voting is no longer something that anyone can do, in fact, it's a form of discrimination. If the government can't teach the masses, and then they charge a ridiculous amount of money to get a ID card for an election, they're essentially telling the poorer (and likely less intelligent people) that they can't vote.
We're too quick to forget what happened when the United States decided that it was time for competency tests, and black people were discriminated against.. because comptency was directly in line with socioeconomic status. This is unfair to the poor people. It's a sad day in India when these 800,000 machines (which will hardly service 1,000,000,000 people) are spread through India.
Obviously it's nice to see voting become fast and easy
I'm not crying about the 0.75 USD, I'm just saying that it's a form of discrimination. They shouldn't be required to have these ID cards, which they will be required to have. Even if it's not a requirement, it'll be a major turn off to voting.
Well, there's my 0.75 USD.
A major problem with these new voting machines is that they do not allow you to cancel your votes without letting others know. If you want to cancel your vote (in case if you don't like any of the candidates), you will have to fill up a form and submit it to the officer in charge. During the ballot era - you could put the mark beside two or more candidates, and your vote would get cancelled automatically. Of course, one can abstain from voting altogether, but in that case, chances are that the local politician's pet goons would cats the vote in your name :-).
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..
They are using two kinds of voting machine, One from ECIL and another from BEL, both government owned companies(from the article).
A bit of googling bought their sites up. ECIL webpage is pretty low on details, but BEL gives some info here.
Apparently no OS is used, they have coded assembly right into the chips, so virtually tamper proof.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
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
India is a country where elections come out fair only because of our always upright election commission and because they are so rigged.
It makes a curious kind of sense -- local politicians in rural areas often pay constituents to vote -- but each constituency (ballot box, rather) is just 1500-odd votes, and hence dwarfed by the size of the country. Also, the worst offenders are usually caught by the election commission, setting examples for the rest.
The other, more dangerous form of rigging elections, is when influential politicians inflate the electoral roll and have people vote multiple times. This happens largely in the metros, because in constituencies with huge electoral rolls and many migrant labourers, fake names are more likely to go unnoticed. The election commission tries to regulate this as much as is possible, but how do you challenge the identity of a man (or woman) who possesses no identification beyond a birth certificate? Especially when you consider migrant labourers who work in big cities, and who often have nothing but names to confirm their identities.
It is to redress this second form of rigging that voter id cards were introduced. As of now they have no other uses beyond identification for voting, and the government has no plans to make them so.
So put it all in perspective, and it makes sense. I am a libertarian by nature, but I understand the bind the election commission is in.
shooting is not too good for my enemies
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)
the same reason why americans went to the moon - 1. because you can do it 2. you do not stop living just because poverty is a problem. Poverty is always a problem in every society. While poverty is being tackled should an entire nation stop investing in technology and stuff used to enable one to "live on the bleeding edge of.."? 3. I don't want this to be a troll, but your question is plain silly and condescending.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Conducting an election for 1 billion people is no easy task,
the various costs that the government will incurr on a traditional paper based voting system
i) Printing of the ballot paper (paper on which the vote is marked), this takes about 60-70 % of the cost of election thats coz because the crieteria for being a candidate are
a) the person must be above 24
b) the deposit was earlier INR 1000 to 2000 odd thats about $25 - $50 max.
then the no of candiates used to be around 50, in some places it had touched 100, think of printing a paper with 100 candiates name on it and a few million copies of it, u get the point....
ii) logistics of movement of ballot boxes and personell and the security along with it and personnel payements about 20 - 25 %
iii) misc 5% like the security ink, etc
the initial cost of acquring electronic voting machines are a bit high, but since the same machines can be used for all public elections, the long term benifits are cumulative and it is clearly visible
the electronic voting machines help in reducing the money spent on ballot paper by a minimum of 50% which can be used for other development purposes
this system was tested in earlier elections and everyone is satisfied with this system as this reduces the number of double voting (like the stamp is put for two or more candidates) an other voting anomilies.....
Back in India, we face the same problems as any other democracy; heck, I'll argue that we face more lobbyists and well-entrenched groups than you Americans do. The ongoing 'debate' over the tax reform is a perfect example; the central government has been trying to move all the 25 states into a uniform VAT zone for the last 8 or so years without any succcess. Grapevine has it that a solution is possible only in 2005, well after the next round of general elections. We are, after all, one-sixth of all humanity; there's bound to be someone somewhere who doesn't like something for some reason.
The electronic voting machines also had significant problems in deployment; if I remember correctly, they were developed way back in the 80's itself, at the (government-owned) Electronic Corporation of India Ltd (the products webpage doesn't mention voting machines, so I could be wrong on the company) There were just too many groups resisting technology; as followers of Indian politics will note, elections in the 80's and 90's were invariably accompanied by booth-capturing, rigging and voter impersonation. Goondas (that's Indian English for the American 'rowdy') patronised by political parties would often take over polling booths, and stuff ballot papers in them. If you really wanted to vote on Election Day, you'd want to vote early in the day itself; not only to avoid the crowd, and violence if any, but also because someone else would have already voted under your name. And then, there'd be those political clashes, electoral violence, bomb blasts... an endless tyranny making a mockery of our constitutional values.
Obviously, the situation needed some strong action and, as I recall, the then Election Commissioner, Mr TN Seshan (who was and still is a sort of middle-class Indian hero), strongly asserted his Commission's independence from the government de jour, by the following measures:-
a)Paramilitary Forces:-
Not many Indians realise this, but elections in India see the world's largest peacetime movement of troops. All elections these days, unless they are the sub-province-level Panchayat elections, are actually conducted by the federal paramilitary battalions, the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) etc, and not the state police, who report to the government of the day and, therefore, presumably are not to be trusted.[1]
b) Behavioural Changes:-
For a month or so before the actual elections exercise, the Commission enforces a so-called "Model Code of Conduct" on all political parties; among other things, the contestants can't promise soft bribes for their constituents. Compliance is entirely voluntary; the Commission can't, for instance, pull someone up for breaking the Code, but then, which contestant in his right mind would want to be caught on the wrong side of his constituents' ire?
This was certainly the case between 1991 and 1995/6, until elections were announced in the teeny-weeny state of Goa, bringing us to step (c), technology.
c) Technology:-
Only after the above two easy-sounding, but difficult-to-implement steps did the Election Commission turn to technology. Even there there has been significant backlash; as I recall, there were many states that were tardy in issuing voter ID's. And even in that, the voter ID's are technologically-minimal; they are basically laminated printouts of a voter's digital pic, his name, address, date of birth, and the EC's hologram.
The end result is a vastly improved electoral process. Booth capturing and rigging will now completely vanish, even if it's only because the goondas haven't as yet figured out how to crack the voting machine. And then, there are obvious questions as to the quality of the nincompoops we elect.
That, however, shouldn't d
More than mere navel gazing.
You go to vote, get a retinal scan stored with your vote. If you vote more than once, [insert appropriate action here: {use the most recent vote | use only unchanged votes | throw away vote | some other action}].
The big security hole is fake retinas being inserted into the database. There's always a point of weakness in the security hierarchy where you might be able to slip in fake data. It's plausible to be able to detect fake retinal images, but that may not be possible. Of course, false data is the bane of any electronic voting device.
The good part, though, is that it allows people to vote anonymously and vote only once without being identified--as long as there's no database that correlates retinas to names, that is.
(Oh my god ... I didn't just use "OMG" did I?)
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Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Diebold industries supplied approximately 400,000 of the 800,000 machines in the Indian election. The company indicated that some machines were previously slated for the upcoming 2004 election and were sent to India for testing. Election monitors were confused, however, when votes cast for any Prime Minister candidate accidentally began to read George W. Bush, despite the fact that the US President is both ineligible and unqualified for the Indian PM position. Diebold promises to research the bug.
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I had the fun of voting for 1 of 130 candidates in a state election using a paper ballot. Was more fun ;-).