Responding to a plethora of complaints from political parties which lost the recent election to the Uttar Pradesh and Punjab Assemblies about possible rigging of Electronic Voting Machines, Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi said the EC had no favourites and that it maintained equidistance from all parties. The criticism was not against the EC but against EVMs which the EC maintains are infallible. Mr Zaidi threw a challenge to the doubting parties to demonstrate its tampering under strict conditions and organised a hackathon from 3 June at the Nirvachan Sadan in New Delhi. Only the CPI-M and the Nationalist Congress Party have taken up the challenge while the Aam Aadmi Party, which was in the forefront of the demand, wanted to be allowed to tinker with the motherboard. Zaidi denied permission, saying it was the heart of the EVM.

While the AAP and the Congress have questioned the framework of the hackathon, the BJP, CPI and the Rashtriya Lok Dal wanted to observe the show. Experts in electronics had misgivings from the time EVM was introduced in a few constituencies on an experimental basis in the 1980s. Barring the Congress, almost all mainstream political parties, which included the BJP, CPI and CPI-M, Janata Party, Janatal Dal (United), AIADMK, Rashtriya Lok Dal, Samajwadi Party and the Telugu Desam Party had expressed reservations of the EVMs in the aftermath of the 2009 Lok Sabha election, even as the then Chief Election Commissioner, Navin Chawla, maintained that the Indian EVMs were superior and “infallible.” The electronic voting system in our Parliament House is a standing example that there is no such thing as an infallible electronic voting system as our honourable members frequently resort to paper ballots, doubting the numbers thrown up by the electronic system.

When the EC adopted EVMs, it had practically no knowledge about its technology. It had relied on a committee of experts led by Prof PV Indiresan, retired Director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. His expertise was electrical engineering, that many said was dated and had no connection with modern electronics. According to experts, the danger for EVM manipulation is not only its software but also the hardware which can easily be replaced either in parts or as the entire unit. One crucial part that can be manipulated is the microcontroller used in the EVMs into which the software is copied.

Each EVM contains two EEPROMS (Electrically Erasable and Programmable Memory) inside the control unit in which the voting data is stored The machines are completely unsecured and can be manipulated from an external source. Bharat Electronics Limited, Bengaluru, and the Electronic Corporation of India Limited, Hyderabad, manufacturers of Indian EVMs, have shared the confidential software programme with Microchip of the USA and Renesas of Japan to copy it onto micro-controllers used in the EVMs.

When these foreign companies deliver micro-controllers fused with software code to the EVM manufacturers, neither the manufacturer nor the EC officials can read back their contents because they are locked. This process should have been done securely by the Indian manufacturers of EVMs. By using generic micro-controllers rather than the more secure ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) or FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), EVM manufacturers have facilitated easy replacement of micro-controllers. Such manipulations would go undetected because the EC and the manufacturer are not in the habit of undertaking any hardware or software audit. It is for these reasons GVL Narasimha Rao, psephologist-turned-BJP spokesperson, came out with his seminal book, Democracy at Risk ~ Can We Trust our EVM? after the 2009 Lok Sabha election.

That EVMs are fallible was known to the EC at least since 2000 when MS Gill was the CEC. At the behest of Subramanian Swamy, then president of the Janata Party, Prof Sanjay Sarma of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Prof Gitanjali of Harvard University demonstrated how vulnerable the chips in the EVMs were. Some changes in procedures were made subsequently, but the fundamental flaws remained. There was a flurry of activities in the EC after the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the result of which surprised even the victorious Congress.

Amidst widespread criticism of tampering with the EVMs, CEC Navin Chawla invited two IT software engineers from Hyderabad, Hariprasad and VV Rao, to demonstrate in the presence of representatives from the doubting political parties and Prof Indiresan, technical adviser to the EC, how the ‘infallible’ EVMs could be breached. Half way through, EC officials abruptly aborted the demonstration claiming it violated the patent rights of ECIL, manufacturer of the EVM. Subsequently, Hariprasad managed to get an EC EVM from Mumbai and demonstrated before the public how it could be manipulated. Instead of learning about the vulnerability of the EVM and finding ways and means of rectifying them, the EC prosecuted Hariprasad for alleged theft of one of its EVMs. Political parties wanting to observe the hacking on 3 June need not wait that long. The entire exercise is available on You Tube. Many experts on Information Technology and electronics and distinguished professors of computer science in advanced countries including the USA and Japan maintain that any man-made system can be tampered with.

The decision of the EC to incorporate the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system in all its EVMs before the 2019 Lok Sabha election is a welcome move as it allows a voter to physically verify that the vote cast by him goes only to the candidate selected by him and no one else. The small printout of the vote cast is deposited in a box and kept in the custody of the EC.

Considering the general feeling of the losing candidates about EVM manipulation, there is a possibility of every runner-up insisting on counting the VVPATs cast in his favour and tally it with the EVM figure of the winning candidate. In such cases, declaration of result could be delayed even more than the counting of regular ballot papers of yesteryear. The EC takes about three months to conduct a General Election, but wants the counting to be over in just a few hours by deploying EVMs. Because of the risk of tampering, countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy and some of the states in the USA have banned EVMs. The technologically advanced countries like Britain, France and Japan never allowed EVMs in their elections.

Article 324 of the Constitution vests the superintendence, direction and control of election to the Election Commission. Election is the essence of democracy. It is through the electoral process that political parties and leaders are chosen to govern the country. Over the years, the electoral process has faced challenges to its integrity and the EC has been found wanting in maintaining the highest standards. One area it should pay attention to is to ensure election petitions are disposed of within six months of the election. If need be, the Representation of the People Act could be amended suitably to achieve this. Stealing elections are not unknown in India. Massive buying of votes, criminalizing of electoral politics and utilising mafia muscle power have crept into the electoral process robbing it of its integrity.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha election in Sivaganga, the returning officer was intimidated to declare the runner-up the winner by manipulating the voting figures in the last round of counting. The election petition of the aggrieved candidate was dragged on for five years by seeking stay after stay till the case became infructuous when the present Lok Sabha was constituted in 2014. It was a travesty of electoral integrity. The EC should address this problem seriously and ensure no repetition of this kind of blatant stealing of election ever takes place in future.

The writer is a veteran journalist and former Director of The Statesman Print Journalism School