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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 A bit out-of date as it does not refer to the new generation - Rahual, Priyanka and Varun Gandhi
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.
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.