The
live demonstration in the Delhi Assembly last week of how an Electronic Voting
Machine (EVM) could be tampered made tangible and credible a threat that most of us thought to be a
conspiracy theory muttered by losing parties after an election defeat. Now
before I go forward let me underline that despite great doubt and suspicion we
have no evidence that EVMs were tampered in the recent assembly elections, and
with the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) current posture I doubt it will ever rise above
the level of suspicion and doubt. I’m not writing this piece about what might have happened in the past but the possible vulnerabilities our electoral process currently faces now that we know EVMs can be tampered in order to manipulate the vote tally by such stealth that no election official from the high and mighty Chief Election Commissioner all the
way down to poll booth officials would even be aware of it.
I
am a novelist, a political novelist to be specific, and in my novels I try to
construct credible political scenarios for India in a parallel universe,
similar to ours but not quite. Let’s create another parallel universe now where,
to make it interesting, suppose that Arvind Kejriwal is Prime Minister of
India. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking, but this is my creation and you
don’t get a vote! Now let’s say Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal, drunk with
power and hubris as all PM’s become sooner or later, makes use of his
considerable knowledge about EVMs and orders his aides in the PMO to do whatever
is required to tamper EVMs in order to insure electoral success for the
conceivable future. Could the PMO pull it off? Possibly. How? Keep reading.
The
two PSUs that manufacture EVMs are Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), which comes
under the Defence Ministry, and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL),
which comes under the Department of Atomic Energy whose minister is the PM
himself. Chief executives of PSUs are not generally known to ask too many
questions when orders come down from the PMO, and even if some brave soul did
show some spine the PMO could appoint a new CMD to either PSU in the blink of
an eye.
There
would be no need for the PMO to interfere at the level of manufacturing the
EVMs which would require the involvement of more people in the conspiracy and an
unnecessary risk. In between election cycles the EVMs undergo maintenance in
their storage facilities across the country, for which BEL and ECIL are
responsible. But the story is not quite that straightforward. Let me allow GVL
Narasimha Rao, renowned for his expertise on EVMs and also incidentally a
ubiquitous BJP leader/spokesman, explain in his own words taken in full from a
Rediff interview in March 2014:
“To begin with every EVM needs to be kept
in a secure environment so that it is cannot be tampered with. However, what we had found is that these
machines were dumped in an open yard which made it vulnerable to tampering.
As a result of dumping these machines in the open, many had gone missing and the ECI has not yet revealed these
details to us. The most important part of this machine is the chip, which
contains the source code. We suggested that since these machines were kept in
the open, it would be advisable to at least change the chip. These chips cost
not more than Rs 100 each.
“The other
suggestion that we made and was not taken was regarding the maintenance of the
machines. These machines are manufactured by Bharat Electronics Limited and
Electronics Corporation of India. These companies send engineers to carry out a
maintenance check or a first level check. Shockingly,
these are not employees of the above mentioned two companies. They are
agents hired on a contract basis and they conduct the inspection of these
machines before the elections. We suggested that the job of the first level
check be given to the National Informatics Centre so that the person doing the
job has accountability. We had pointed
out that some of these persons who were hired to conduct this check belonged to
software companies that were being run by politicians. The chances of
tampering are higher in such cases. However, the ECI did not agree with
us. The problem is that there is a leap of blind faith in technology and
the ECI blindly trusts everything that
the manufacturer does. We have always pointed out that elections cannot be
based on trust.”
Quite
an indictment of our electoral process by Shri Rao. So all the PMO would have
to do is nudge the two PSUs to give EVM maintenance contracts to private
entities of their choosing and over time these engineers would have access to
an ever increasing percentage of the EVMs and do as they wish with machines.
I’m informed that changing the motherboard of the EVM, which contains the chip,
would take no more than a minute. Not that these engineers would be in any
hurry, since they would be legitimately doing their jobs and have no time
limitation. The Election Commission would be utterly oblivious to what was going
on. They would seal and lock the EVMs shortly before the next round of
elections without the slightest clues that the EVMs had been tampered and done
so through routine maintenance that they themselves had sanctioned. Election
Commission would genuinely keep parroting that “our EVMs cannot be tampered”
and do so while fully believing it.
After
this on polling day the ruling party would send their people, as bona fide voters,
to the polling booths with the tampered EVMs and the deed would be done,
whether by punching in a code, as demonstrated in the Delhi Assembly, or even
by sending a signal from a mobile phone to the EVM if the tampering is of a
higher order. The EVMs that seemed normal up till this point would thereafter
start manipulating the vote tally as instructed. For a more detailed explanation
read this eye-opening interview with Professor Poorvi Vora of George Washington University
in The Hindu.
I
admit I have oversimplified the scenario slightly for the benefit of coherence
because in addition to the actual tampering getting the tampered EVMs
positioned in polling booths likely to give maximum electoral advantage would
require some manipulation at the level of the Election Commission. But I have
little doubt our Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal, sneaky little fellow that he
is, would be able in due course to appoint Election Commissioners owing loyalty
to him and the Election Commission would become suitably pliant. And in the
meantime if any EVMs ‘malfunctioned’, having been observed voting only for the ruling
party, they would be whisked away by the Election Commission before any neutral experts could
run diagnostics on them. If opposition parties ever raised genuine objections about
EVMs the Election Commission would refuse to hold a proper hackathon and instead agree to a
‘challenge’ where experts would be expected to hack the EVMs using
extra-sensory powers because they would actually be forbidden from touching the
EVMs. All this while, the credibility of EVMs was increasingly questioned in
other continents like Africa to where they were exported.
This
is all hypothetical, of course, I’m sure the current government would never be
as underhanded as the fictional Prime Minster Kejriwal in my scenario. But my
point is a larger one, that when the Election Commission is blind to advances
in technology and leaves loopholes in its processes that any ruling party can
feasibly take full advantage of, the Election Commission is letting us all
down, because no Prime Minister ever attained his high office and no ruling
party ever won a general election by following their sense of fair play. Going
forward we are told that VVPAT EVMs which leave a paper trail will put all
doubts to end. At the same time we now hear of this magic cable that can be
used to connect the ballot unit and the control unit of an EVM and thereafter
manipulate the vote tally without having to tamper with the EVM’s circuitry at
all. If you build it, someone will hack it. As I sit writing this piece, computer
systems across the world are reeling from the worst ever hack in the form of a ransomware
attack. That’s the world we live in today while the Election Commission is
living in denial.
I’ll
leave it for you to decide whether the scenario I described above is feasible.
But I must conclude with due apologies to the real life Arvind Kejriwal who was
the driving force behind the EVM tampering demonstration in the Delhi Assembly,
overcoming many naysayers and who, I assure you, is not a sneaky little fellow
at all.
