“Electronic voting is unconstitutional because the average citizen could not be expected to understand the exact steps involved in the recording and tallying of votes by the electronic voting machines (EVMs),’ ruled the German Federal Constitutional Court in 2009.
As a result of this landmark judgement, Germany—technologically one of the most advanced nations in the world—banned the use of EVMs.
Ulrich Wiesner, a physicist and software engineer, who had filed the petition before the Constitutional Court, noted: “In the coming years we will be able to observe how authoritarian states in particular will use the ‘potential’ of electronic elections. The electronic elections will help rulers ostensibly hold democratic elections without having to leave the election results to chance.”
Wiesner told this scribe that his concern and thus his application to the court stemmed from Germany’s horrifying experience in the 1930s and 1940s, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party established a fascist dictatorship through adult franchise.
He asserted: “When the Election Commission of India claims the (voting) machines are not riggable… it is common sense that someone who has sufficient access to open the machines and replace the software or hardware can implement virtually any functionality, including vote stealing functionality, that is only activated under certain circumstances and would not be spotted in tests.”
France, Belgium, Ireland and The Netherlands did away with EVMs after experimenting with them. In Asia, Japan and Singapore, two of the most advanced nations in this continent, have stuck to traditional paper ballots. Recently, Bangladesh decided to dispense with EVMs.
Unlawful methods were allegedly employed in the 2000 and 2016 United States presidential elections to favour the winners. Though EVMs are not used in America, the US-based Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) published a resolution passed by over 1,000 experts across multiple countries, which recorded: ‘Election integrity cannot be assured without openness and transparency. But an election without voter-verifiable ballots (physical proof of voting) cannot be open and transparent.
‘The voter cannot know that the vote eventually reported is the same as the vote cast, nor can candidates or others gain confidence in the accuracy of the election by observing the voting and the vote counting processes.
‘There is no reliable way to detect errors in recording votes or deliberate election rigging with these machines. Hence, the results of any election conducted using these machines are open to question.’
In 2010, a BJP leader and Rajya Sabha MP G.V.L. Narasimha Rao wrote a book titled Democracy at Risk! Can We Trust our Electronic Voting Machines? It was dedicated to the citizens of India, with an emphatic statement: ‘They deserve a fully transparent and verifiable electoral system.’ The foreword was by BJP stalwart L.K. Advani, former deputy prime minister of India and former party president.
Advani was BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, which the BJP lost. Advani wrote, ‘I regard it significant that Germany, technologically one of the most advanced countries… has become so wary of EVMs as to ban their use altogether.’
In the same book, David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, stated: ‘Electronic voting machines provide no evidence during or after the election to convince a sceptic that the election results are accurate.’
Dill went on to emphasise: ‘…it is not feasible to prevent malicious changes to the machines’ hardware or software. Electronic voting machines are especially vulnerable to malicious changes by insiders such as designers, programmers, manufacturers, maintenance technicians, etc.
Of course, these problems are magnified enormously when the design of the machines is held secret from independent reviewers.’ On 8 June 2019, Professor Dill informed this writer by email: “When someone claims that a system is ‘unhackable’, I immediately suspect their competence. Competent security people are very cautious about such claims.”
He asked if the Election Commission of India (ECI) had “published the designs of the machines? Have there been independent security reviews? Have the results of those reviews been published?” The answer to all of the above was in the negative.
Related essay: To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism: A Review
Rao argues in the book: ‘There are several instances that we have come across where machines have “switched” votes between candidates and have even “produced” votes that were never cast!’ And that ‘several personal accounts of senior politicians [had] been approached by electronic “fixers” demanding hefty sums to fix elections in their favour’.
He continues: ‘It’s not merely that our EVMs, like any other in the world, are prone to tampering in any number of ways by external hackers, but that the more insidious and ever-present danger which the ECI refuses to acknowledge is “insider fraud”—by any of the thousands of “authorised” personnel having access to the machines.
‘These include the Indian developers and manufacturers of the machines, the vendors supplying the components including the foreign companies who have been assigned the security-sensitive job of fusing the software onto the microchips sourced from them, the local officials who have the custody of the machines before, during and after elections, the technicians assigned for maintenance, repair and testing of the machines, etc.’
As he rightly points out: ‘In our system of representative democracy, elections provide the only occasion when the people directly exercise their sovereign power. Immediately thereafter this power is ceded to the elected representatives. If this sacred power is vitiated by a voting system of dubious integrity open to insidious fraud, it is evident that our democracy is seriously endangered.’
Although presumably wedded to religion— for he is a lawmaker of the BJP—he jokingly writes: ‘All this begs a simple question: are we running “faith-based” elections that we should “trust” all these insiders and not question their actions shrouded in mystery?’
Since the BJP came to power in 2014, Rao has been conspicuously silent on the subject. On 19 May 2020, this scribe e-mailed him asking whether he stood by what he said in his book. Rao has not responded till date.
While India has progressed impressively in terms of developing indigenous scientific knowhow, it is ridiculous to suggest it has invented better and more secure EVMs than countries at the cutting edge of computer science, for an EVM is nothing but a computer. An overwhelming section of Indian voters are unaware of the shortcomings of EVMs. Besides, Indian media has singularly failed in its duty by being lackadaisical in fervently raising such a vital issue pertaining to democracy.
And the judiciary, too, has neither adopted a proactive policy nor treated the worries of informed citizens with due seriousness.
******
Courtesty https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/can-we-count-on-the-electronic-voting-machines#:~:text=the%20average%20citizen-,could,-not%20be%20expected
Thank you for sharing this informative and well-structured blog post. The content was presented in a logical manner, and I could follow the progression of ideas easily. To delve deeper into this topic, click here.