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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."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
That explains why Sonia Gandhi is poised to take power in the world's largest democracy after voters delivered one of the biggest upsets in the nation's history. Every one voted for Vajpayee and Gandhi wins!
fuck you all I hate all of you!!!
Diebold suxx0rs, Dubya shoulda lost!
America sucks!
India is great, they have a Communist party!
India is great, they are poorer than we are!
America is proud, they deserve to have egg in their face!
America is too successful, they need to be taught a lesson!
Whatever, I still want my tinfoil hat!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Print out an alternate list of candidates, with your opponent swapped with an unlikely candidate. Stick it to the front of the voting machine. Anyone with 3 seconds unsupervised access to the machine can pull this off, and it may go unnoticed if it otherwise looks exactly like the original.
I mean... Ghandi won, and he's been dead for years now!
Casual Games/Downloads
For those with concerns about security, hacking, etc. there are possible solutions. A good, low cost, locked-down EVM can be deployed on a standard PC - running any OS - the UI needs to be only a radio-button-type list box, with a submit/cancel button, and a tracker for each entry in the list box. The Admin views can be kept on a separate machine, and downloaded into the actual EVM PC. Top-class encryption can be thrown in with no additional complexity. A basic reporting app can tabulate and display results. No network cards needed on the EVM
What other features would ensure better acceptance of EVMs?
I'm sure it was a smooth process, since they have every US technician to draw on for any troubleshooting.
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.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
Disturbing too is that Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense knew about this and didn't take immediate action and didn't even inform the leaders in Congress. John Kerry has called for Donald Rumsfeld to resign -- and the Kerry Campaign is asking us to show support for his decision by endorsing his statement here:
http://johnkerry.com/petition/rumsfeld.php
I did -- and you should too.
I find it so funny it's 2004 and the 'Indians' are still seperated from 'The other Americans'
Correct me if I'm wrong, we still share the same country, right?
-Imidazole
Hilarious Office Prank!
From the comparison in the article:
Power Supply
EVM: 6V alkaline batteries
Diebold: electricity
So batteries don't produce electricity? Interesting...
"...and the result is an upset. As reported earlier, this election was conducted entirely through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs)."
I see no reason why using EVMs would necessarily result in an 'upset', unless of course they are using closed source voting machines in which no one can review the code to see there isn't any hanky panky.
Things that should be open source: voting machines, encryption programs, anonymous p2p applications, the majority of things dealing with security.
as was discussed in this NYTimes from April 27 article (sorry, only abstract here, unless you're willing to pay). The Police were overwhelmed and the whole site was taken over by party workers, who then proceeded to push the button for their candidate again and again and again. The Times even had a photograph of it.
Certainly a big advantage of electronic voting is seen as being able to vote remotely, over the internet or whatever (it's certainly been used in the UK for local council elections). The Indian system just seems like small non-networked computers at the polling stations as a replacement for boxes of paper. It's got big advantages for counting etc. but it doesn't do what a lot of people would want (secure internet voting).
Ah the results the upset, i understand now :).
Don't change my message though, I look forward to more EVM's in the future if they are done correctly.
outsourced to India!
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.
...outsourced the handling of his campaign to American campaign experts, one of the few areas where we Americans still have a comparative advantage.
...it was a big surprise upset? In the US elections last fall when it happened, they're still saying that the upset was due to the machines being misprogrammed/miscalibrated/0wned.
Who really knows?
I hope we don't get Gore ][ when Kerry loses in November.
I've chosen to post anonymously because of the censo... err.. moderation system on /.
I know... I'm SORRY damnit! But I've got to mention it because I have a question and this is at least vaguely related though still off-topic... I'm just hoping for an educated yes or no on this.
Lately I have been receiving spam giving me tips that evoting stocks are predicted to be on the rise and that I should buy. Now given all the bad press evoting has been getting, and especially Diebold's behavior betraying public trust as they have... is this kind of spam basically illegal?
That said, I will now mention my feelings on the indian evm. It sounds like the best approach. It's simple and effective. I would like to see more of an audit trail built into the machine though I suspect there is more information stored than accumulated data. The indian system is good because it's state-owned. The indian system is good because there are more people involved.
I don't like the idea of having up-to-the second voting results. People should vote their minds and not mind the vote. I don't know how indians vote, but americans tend to vote against candidates they don't want rather that for the candidates they want. This mentality tends to shut out alternative voting such as green party, libertarian or independants.
Anyway... let's see if I'm modded as off-topic or what?
"Diebold system works on Microsoft software, it has no seals on locks and panels to detect a tempering. It has a keyboard interface (!!!) and the server was tested to have "Blaster" virus."
The claim is that a Diebold box was insecure enough to be wide open for use by any passing hacker via the back-door.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
He has also started construction of a massive sign extending right across the Indian sub-continent proclaiming "0wn3d" in large black lettering.
Each machine has its own strengths and weaknesses based on various design goals. If you happen to be looking for fair and accurate voting tech, by all mean go with the Indian setups. Diebold's customers have different requirements is all.
..these elections have been a landmark for the country, and not just because of the use of EVM's. EVM's had been used earlier for state elections, but this was the first general election in which they were used.
:-)
It also marks a shift in public opinion - the ruling party admits it miscalculated the public poll and did not do well with its India Shining campaign.
For a more insight into the surprises brought by the election, have a look at the pictures here [BBC] (among them, the EVM's being transported by elephants)
http://efil.blogspot.com/
And while we're talking about Indian Election results, I would like to point out that she was an Italian citizen till 1983 when she obtained Indian citizenship - she's still a Roman Catholic - though she follows Hindu practices (for example during former PM Rajiv Gandhi's (her husband - no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) funeral).
In addition, India, a primarily/traditionally Hindu country has a Muslim president - Dr. Abdul Kalam - who's an all around great guy and a scientist/genius - and an open source advocate. RMS met him personally when in India.
I know I'm tottering a little OT, but I think it's something to be proud of, when a country and it's citizens can be secular/open-minded enough to ignore religious/cultural differences and choose their leader based on personal merit - moreover with today's world affairs.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
It works because the main responsibility still rest with the election officials, not the electronic device.
The main difference from a normal electoral system is that the "box" is a button-based data recorder here, instead of a ballot paper box. Everything else is the same, no roles were being replaced.
Btw, anyone knows if there is a button for casting invalid vote?
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Can be found here at the BBC.
I am pro-lifechoice.
Along with the use of EVM's in India, at every polling station, there are usually representatives of all parties and/or independent candidates besides the Election Commission's representatives, who have with them the voter list for that constituency.
Every voter has to produce a proof of identity. Upon verification, his/her name is called out, and all the representatives go through their individual paper lists, as well the EC representatives, and they mark that person has cast a vote.
After you cast the vote, an indelible ink mark is put against the fingernal of the index finger (or other fingers if you have any handicap), which takes a few days to dissolve and disappear.
The number of people that cast the ballot is then verified against the number of people who have been marked as "voted" in these individual paper lists at the end of the polling day.
On the final counting day, of course the EVM provides the actual votes cast, but the count of votes is re-verified against EC representative's list.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
THIS MISTAKE OR who seel another and abroad for
I saw Greg Palast in Berkeley a few weeks back and he was talking about the 'systems' in place in Florida. In one county if you spoiled your vote, the machine spat the ballot back at you and you got a fresh chance to vote. In another county, your ballot disappeared into a chute and if you spoiled your vote, you never knew about it. In the case of the former, the county was overwhelmingly white (and Republican-voting) while in the latter the county was overwhelmingly black (and Democrat-voting). But then invesitgative Journalists like Mr Palast are just 'conspiracy theorists,' aren't they?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I actually worked with BEL many years ago. I worked for a company that developed this with BEL (we did the simulator part, they did everything else).
Yet Another Web Site
Just my $0.02 worth.
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.
Even then it's still better than the worst
With ballot papers, the favorite hobby of quite a few people used to be to mimic a printing press for a few minutes to fill the ballot box
(I am not sure about the actual duration) but the evm accepts only 1 vote every minute I guess
and that makes it slightly difficult for the Human Voting Machines
Damn the EVMs beat the HVMs
Why aren't we purchasing our voting equipment in the US with the same rigid standards as casinos take to their games machines? I mean honestly, some of the stupidity taken with some of these (for instance the wifi access to an MDB file ...) is just ludicrous if you had offered the same level of "security" to a casino with their electronic poker machines they would have laughed you out the door.
Simplistic devices with a single input method and a disabled output method until the machine is closed out for voting. At that point only those responsible for the voting machines can even transfer the votes. On top of which a verified paper ballot is essential in any election with electronic devices.
Sadly the US populous is far less informed than the rest of the world. Most don't even care how big an upset the Indian election was, nor the fact that it is historic for it's electronic voting methods. I doubt this will have much of an impact on the Diebold hotbutton of the week.
I am not an Open Software fundamentalist, as I use interchangeably Windowns and Linux in the course of my work. But I always get to see the direct result of my actions, even when they don't occur in the exact same manner I intended them too (sometimes, it's just because I did it wrong :) )
But as far as software-only e-voting, how the hell can I trust my vote, of which I have no feedback, will be registered right by a system whose source-code I have no access to? In this case, I believe that OS is clearly the way... and I agree with the article on the need for simple solutions. Such a complicated architecture is bound to have errors!
But, I live in Portugal, where e-voting is still just not an issue :) It just scares me that elections in such an important country, as far as the world equilibrium is concerned, might have it's leadership stolen
Last elections in Liberia were won by a candidate which boasted a full 1500% votes. :))) Hope I never hear anything similar from that side of the Atlantic
1. Rig elections of country that is sucking jobs from your homeland so that socialist wins
2. Sit back and watch said country's ecconomy crumble.
3. Reclaim jobs for your homeland.
4. ????
5. Profit!
As the /.-ed article mentions, the system does not allow the casting of more than 5 ballots in a minute. So the party workers can press all the buttons they want, but it will make almost no difference unless all electoral booths are overtaken OR the police are really really slow OR the party workers somehow manage to keep pressing the buttons for hours on end.
In an address on national television Mr Vajpayee said he accepted the verdict and said it was a demonstration of India's strong democractic roots. "My party and alliance may have lost but India has won," he said.
This is amazing. Why can't our politicians act like this when they lose? Maybe I'll move to India. It's probably easier to get a job there anyway.
Off-Topic
"choose their leader based on personal merit "
Anyone with something between their ears'd tell you that this doesn't apply to Ms. Sonia Gandhi
Everyone and his/her dog knows that she's becoming the PrimeMinister only because of being the widow Mr.Rajiv Gandhi who happened to become the PM only because of being the son of Ms. Indira Gandhi who again happened to become the PM only because of being the daughter of Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru
Enough said
now flame me
nt
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
...where the previous party in power was of the gang sort, was this possible. In most locations, things went quite smooth.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
It's just too hard to fix an election if the system is simple or reliable. It seems there is a need to keep voters confused and distracted, and this would fit perfectly with the Diebold design.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Every country oursources progamming jobs to India. India just decided to outsource its Prime Minister's spot to Italy. Sonia Gandhi fyi is Italian born.
They build their own electronic voting machines, and outsource their prime ministers :) ;)
Shouldn't it be the other way around? no wait.. Humm..
All said and done, we've just witnessed how a real democracy ought to operate its elections. No hanging or pregnant chads, or dimpled and pimpled ballots.. Importantly, a minority vote cannot decide the fate of a government and that of thousands of innocent people elsewhere in the world.
And most importantly, a robust, self-governed machinery that operates the elections, NOT county officials who can be influenced by the local political establishment (Florida, remember?). The election commission of India answers to nobody but the president who has luckily so far has been someone with little autocratic ambitions, and anyway there are constitutional safeguards against that. Election officials operating the poll booths are school teachers mostly from the neighborhood, meaning that they'd likely know you by name anyway. I remember seeing my primary school teacher ticking off my name at the poll booth, just as she used to do in the classroom when I was younger.
Talk about first-world and third-world democracies
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Wow a simple, low cost, people intensive system that makes simple democratic hardware possible. Where is the big corporation and the multi million dollar pricetag paid by a government deeply in debt??
Of Course microsoft wont waste its government lobby dollars, I imagine a USA solution would require a network gui and a windows logon. They could even use the indian system, after the logon, and call it their innovation!
Why can't we cannibalize ATM technology for voting?
Features:
reciept printer for hard copies
speaker and braille for the visually impaired
simple interface
card reader/PIN entry to identify the voter
cash slot to reward you for for voting for the correct candidate ;)
So, voter walks up, inserts card & enters pin, voter interacts with candidate selection screen (maybe a slightly larger display than an ATM with up/dn arrows and a select key) - Hell, maybe when choosing a candidate, a blurb about that candidate's platform could be shown on-screen (for that last minute campaigning and public education), but IIRC that's against US voting rules...
And while we're at it, why not issue a freakin smart-card based Social Security Card to use with these machines - I'd gladly replace this blue piece of paper with an ancient version of my signature and seemingly typewritten SSN with something more durable like a credit card!
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
One also should not fail to notice the amount of paper and trees saved by india's shift to the electronic voting machines.
this sig violates slashdot rules
In India, the demand for power far exceeds the capacity for generation. At any given time, a many districts are experiencing a complete power cut, though this is properly distributed so that no town goes without power for more than a few hours each week. I guess it would not be possible to have uninterrupted supply from morning to evening in all places going to polls on a particular day. :)
Sometimes if any generating station is overloaded, the entire regional distribution grid collapses, plunging a quarter of the country into darkness, and this happens every few months and needs hours to resolve. Currently the only city in the country which can disconnect itself smoothly from the grid is Bombay, and that is the only place where you can bank on electricity.
Also, the system uses simple box-type EVMs which are more like calculators than computers! There is no networking - every machine is tallied separately on a particular day at the district headquarters. So batteries are really the more sensible and reliable option. And as somebody mentioned elephants, portability is not a problem
I think a small change will help to make rigging more difficult - The order of the listing of the candidates should be changed after every vote is casted. This will make it more difficult to rig false votes.
how did Bush win the Indian election too?
Check out evidence of vote fraud
F B0 F11F93A5E0C748EDDAD0894DC404482
April 27 2004 New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=
ABSTRACT - Indian officials are trumpeting introduction of electronic voting machines as example of the new India, but old India abruptly reappears; in state of Bihar, two small bombs explode near one polling place and party workers threaten five policemen guarding booth, then brazenly take control of it; as poll workers and police avert their eyes, young party workers push button for their party on electronic voting machine over and over again, casting vote after fraudulent vote; incident suggests that like rest of India, country's political operatives are becoming more businesslike and more technologically savvy; photo; map (M)
diebold
is
expensive
broken
obsolete
lacking
dumb
Why would you elect a small bald guy who wears diapers to run your country?
I mean... I know we did the same thing, but at least Cheney was elected to VICE president, not regular old president.
Does incontinence make you a better leader?
;-)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Comparing who purchases the systems has nothing to do with Diebold - that has to do with the national system for handling voting. In the U.S. (irrespective of the company producing the machines), each country handles their voting methods somewhat independently within the bounds of state and federal law. Thus several counties were on contracts with Diebold, but the state could over-ride those.
I'd also like to know where the author gets the idea that illiterate Americans don't get to vote. (Or maybe that was not what he was implying when he mentioned that illiterate Indians use thumbprints rather than signatures.)
Finally, I don't know about other areas, but my polling station is five blocks away from my house. If I wanted to use the one near my work, it wouldn't be that hard to change either. Most difficulty I've heard of comes when people forget to change their voter registration information when they move.
I don't know that Americans would be willing to have their finger stained for two weeks to ensure less chance of fraudulent votes. Of course, with only about half the eligible citizens voting, it could be worn as a badge of honor.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
One thing that really bothered me was the statement in the article that blind people could just take someone in with them to help cast their ballot.
:)
Sure. This works. And it's what was done in most American polling places until the advent of the electric machine.
We have a large blind community at the polling place where I usually work - and I asked one how the new machines worked. She was practically in tears because she was so excited - she had just cast a vote by herself for the first time in her life (and she wasn't no spring chicken).
I realize in the scheme of creating a fair election system, this may seem like a minor point, but it certainly wasn't to her or anyone who talked with her and cares about the human dimension of democracy. Just a quick thought
Elections in America rarely involve voting for one candidate over others for one office. You can have president, senator, congressman, governor, state senator, state representative, mayor, sheriff, district attorney, judge, and other people to vote for. Plus, there are the various states that have the initiative process, in which the voter votes for certain issues including state constitutional amendments.
You need a more complex machine for all that.
But your process has some good ideas. For us, maybe the following: Have some kiosks with touchscreens that all plug directly into a box like in the India method. This box will have a small server and a 16-port ethernet switch all within it, plus a small built-in touchscreen on top. When a kiosk is plugged-in, press a button to validate on the server. Then press a voting start button. When someone comes in, activate a machine for voting on the server like in the India method. Voter punches buttons and gets a paper receipt with a transaction SN. When all's done, press the "voting complete" button on the server, which will close off all ports, encrypt and sign all results and shut down, unable to restart without a key.
The state elections office will have the boot key and the key to decrypt the results and check the signature.
All OSS of course.
I find this to be a well written article, especially for non-Indians who want to understand India's country-wide voting stations. The other likes India's EVMs, with some justification, I think, despite the absence of paper ballot.
However, India's EVMs are not really applicable to a US context. While the idea promoted of "make it as simple as possible" is a good one (violated by Diebold in many ways), the author seems to forget the "but no simpler" corollary. The design of the Open Voting Consortium's system (see http://openvoting.org and http://evm2003.sourceforge.net) strikes the correct compromise.
In fairness, in an Indian context, the idea of having elections with dozens of different races, each with a dozen candidates, plus a bunch of initiatives, might seem strange. But that's what we have in some US jurisdictions. Some US cities have even begun to use ranked preference voting (so far, usually scored as IRV, but maybe Condercet, Burda, Weighted, etc. someday).
The requirements for casting one vote for one MP are rather simple, and India's EVMs add no extra complexity to that.
Buy Text Processing in Python
So now we've outsourced the frontiers of democracy, too...
Why can't we cannibalize ATM technology for voting?
Er, what do you think Diebold's primary line of business is?
(For anyone who had ever walked up to a Diebold ATM or point-of-sale terminal and seen a Blue Screen of Death, none of the news of the last two years has come as any kind of surprise.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
More information is also available at the equipment manufacturer's website.
To put it in technical terms, there's not a chance in hell anything on the equipment manufacturer's website after a scandal like this can be called "information", even when stretching the definition of the word until it hurts.
If you want information about a product, you can't trust the vendor. End of story, unfortunately.
What's with all the overrated mods? This is funny! Are there some Indian moderators who are sensitive to jokes like this? Doesn't seem racist/slanderous to me (honestly).
But tell me --
-- what specifically are you saying there? I'm not trying to strike up sparks, here, just curious what "abuses" we're talking about in "some cases." What harm's recently been done under the banner of secularism in India?
(I'm having some trouble imagining similar abuses in the US. Armies of secular people doing what? Marching in Pro Choice rallies, or something?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
"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).
Braille Paper Ballots. High tech solution - vote by txt msg!
Too late! Dubya wasn't elected by the populace. His brother handed the Presidency to him.
That would require a HUGE change in machine.
Right now the candiates are just stickers pasted on the surface of the machine. To get the names to rearange you'd need to add an electronic display of sorts. and then add the code to change the names around. Just adding the display might suck up more power than those 6V batteries can provide. and what happens if the display flakes out? And displays have really complex electronics. With that "one small change" youve changed what was a battery powered calculator(in complexity) into PC. Shame on you
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Question: if we suspect something is amiss, all evidence points to something being amiss, and investigations prove that something is amiss, are we still being "paranoid"?
[o]_O
...by wearing a plastic-like device on your finger, to absorb the ink. The article says you can't remove the ink without hurting yourself for 2 weeks - presumably this is to make sure you don't vote twice. But couldn't you could keep the ink from touching your skin. Put on, vote, peel off, replace, vote, peel off, etc.
Think of the batman movie where Robin kissed Poison Ivy and still lived, by wearing "protection" on his lips.
"Kinda like not everyone in the US is a cowboy"
There haven't been cowboys in any number in the united states in in over 140 years.
Today, there are very few cowboys left; corporate farms have all but erased the cattle drives of Louis Lamour's books.
...is that the Indian machines are all pre-programmed to vote "Congress".
Think about if the problem really needs to be solved. As I see it the only benifit you get from having an electronic voting system, is that it gets counted faster.
The current electoral system (in ireland anyway) is paper base. (But not for long I suspect. Tests with electronic voting were carried out at the last election.) While it takes a while to count there is no doubt about the validity of your vote. You could, if you wanted to, sit and watch the box that your vote went into until it made it to the counting station. Then examine the seal to see if it was tampered and watch as its counted.
An electronic vote disappears into the mystic void and who knows what happens. You may have some hope of finding out with the indian EVM as its in assembly and fairly short. If your in the USA good luck figuring out all that crap (WinCE, MsSQL server...).
Without electronic voting, the Indian election would have taken months to count I assume. 1 billion voters is a lot so perhaps an electronic method is needed. But in most european countries those problems don't exist.
There is no problem so don't try and fix it.
the voting machines catered for illiterates like the indian ones do.
GWB would probably get a few more votes as well, as neither he nor his supporters appear to be able to read.
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This is only a test. If you read this, you are reading a test.