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Indian Voting Machines Compared with Diebold
Hanuman_Ji writes "The Indian general elections, 2004 is now complete - and the result is an upset. As reported earlier, this election was conducted entirely through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). This article gives a nice overview of the machines used in this process and also adds a comparison with the Diebold machines. More information is also available at the equipment manufacturer's website."
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of Independent India had a daughter, Indira Priyadarshini Nehru who married Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi(Iranian)and took his name. Sonia Gandhi is the daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi.
Interestingly, Feroze Gandhi's name was originally spelt Ghandy or Ghandi - this may have been changed to play on the allusion to Mahatma Gandhi.
There is a great book "The Nehrus and the Gandhis" that has interesting information on the dynasty. A bit out-of date as it does not refer to the new generation - Rahual, Priyanka and Varun Gandhi
Sonia Gandhi is in no way related to mahatma Gandhi. Jawaharlal Nehru was the first PM of India and his daughter , Indira , also a PM ,married a guy whose last name happened to be Gandhi.
Not everyone in India is poor. Kinda like not everyone in the US is a cowboy. Besides, you don't need a ton of people to stuff a bollot box. You need one person and a lot of votes. Besides, someone that politically motivated has connections or they are willing to aquire things by shady means anyways.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
With only 1500 votes cast per machine this would be a rather high risk / low reward way of cheating.. It is safe to assume that if it is worth switching the candidate (i.e. the candidate might win) the candidate would also be well known among the voters. So, chances are that at most a handful of voters would vote wrongly before it got discovered. (And then you might spend some quality time in an Indian prison! Who would want to miss that! ;)
The Indian system seems easy to verify, if the software is just a few hundred lines of assembly each major party can hire their own team who can verify the software. Try that with the Diebold system.. There would never be any elections at all then.
Of course, the central counting office might still be compromised, but it seems this is made hard by simply following the old way of counting paper ballots. (I.e. looking at each machine as a ballot box)
Can be found here at the BBC.
I am pro-lifechoice.
There is a votes-per-hour limit on each machine, and a total-votes-per-polling-place limit of 1500 votes.
So even if you managed to capture the entire output of a polling place, you only affect 1500 votes maximum. With the votes-per-hour limit, you have to hold that polling place for hours to do even that.
Thats a lot of risk for a pretty uncertain and limited advantage.
The article says that the system can have 16 candidates, and machines can be chained for a max of 64.
That wouldn't exactly work over here.
135 or more candidates in one race for office.
Different primary ballots for multiple parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race.
Multiple votes in a race (party central committee)
Lots and lots of races: national, state, local, judicial, etc.
Yes, we do need the massive complexity of Diebold or similar systems to run American elections.
It didn't make news at the time (and makes only a little news now), but e-voting was in fact used in Florida and there were signifigant irregularities with the machines. One district reported massive negative votes for Gore, for example (and although this was noticed and 'corrected', there is no way whatsoever to verify that the 'corrected' results were in fact correct). The hanging chads and whatnot weren't the ONLY election problems in Florida.
You have to understand tho, the indian goverment isn't even halfway as ursurped as ours is. You'll notice that our goverment seems to think that if it isn't expensive, it isn't worth spending money on, especially if it isn't run by a buddy of someone in power. Not to mention the fact that Diebold is run by republicans, and there's proof of loss of votes. The only reason they're able to get away with it is, well, our country is falling apart and most of the media is owned by 6 corps, and within 10 years, 1 corp.
If the American people knew what their goverment has done to them, there'd be a civil war no doubt. Infact, as the middle class dissapears I think more and more people will begin asking pesky questions, and our gestapo FBI won't be able to handle it all.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The Indian EVM machine appears to use the same single plurality vote, supporting up to 16 candidates.
4 EVMs can be chained together, to support 64 candidates. I believe the Election Commission was prepared to have more on standby if there were more than 64 nominations from a constituency. In the last few General Assembly Elections there haven't been more than 34 nominations per constituency. (Nominations cost money, which one forfeits if one doesn't get enough percentage of votes.)
If someone wants to win, they'll convince a dozen other candidates with the same beliefs as their opponents to run and fill up the rest of the candidate list.
The best part about a functioning democracy is that while this sort of ballot-DDOSing is fun to talk about, the legal system ensures that in practice they're not worth doing: Candidates found guilty (after due process, of course) of messing with the poll system get debarred from contesting elections upto 5 years.
LOL, I laughed at that rainbow comment. I have voted on EVMs before and it is not machine to machine or getting your hands sprayed by ink. You get your finger marked once and in the same EVM you cast multpile votes. As for example when I was voting I was voting for State elections as well as national elections and I did it on the same EVM.
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No, there isn't one.
Why is it again that elections can only be held once every four years and every possible decision must be made at the same time? Elections aren't just held every four years. National elections are held every two years. Senators are elected for six year terms, and every two years, one-third of them have to run for office again. Members of the house serve two year terms. States can also have special elections, and many cities will have a number of referendums during the year. It's only when you have presidental elections that you have alot more intrest in voting.
In the Indian voting scenario, there is a separate register where a vote has to sign or put his thumb impression (for illiterate voters) after the election officer has verified their identity. Hence, there is a paper trail for number of votes casted if votes are to be re-counted. Yes, there is no way to audit individual votes in the Indian system.
"You can have president, senator, congressman, governor, state senator, state representative, mayor, sheriff, district attorney, judge, and other people to vote for."
Yes, but not in the same election! They may be on the same day, and even (if you have a paper-ballot) on the same voting sheet, but fundamentally what you are doing in most parts of the US is voting for one candidate over others for one office. Then another one candidate over others for another office...n
Plus in many parts of India there were more than one election held. For instance the sacking by the locals of the tech-savvy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, which may impact that state's ability to invest in infrastructure for the IT industry (or to put it another way, will probably help poor local farmers with free electricity).
That's because in the case of the casinos, hacking the system loses the Powers That Be money. In politics, hacking the system gains them money. After all, if they're not in office, how can they collect their bribes, uh, kickbacks, I mean, 'lobbying contributions'?
You must think in Russian.