The Hindu : National : EVMs evoke misgivings abroad

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 06, 2004

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National

EVMs evoke misgivings abroad

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, MAY 5. India's ongoing tryst with the new era of paperless voting is attracting more than its fair share of interest abroad, even as fears about the robustness of the basic technology led two governments elsewhere, to cancel electronic voting scheduled in the coming months.

The Republic of Ireland announced recently that it would use electronic machines for elections to the European Parliament in June this year — and spent 50 million euros on the hardware and software sourced from the Netherlands company, Nedap.

But persistent media leaks about the shortcomings of the software of its ``Powervote'' system forced the Irish Government to hastily set up a commission to look into the fears. Earlier this week, Dublin called off the e-voting exercise after the Commission said it could not obtain the source code of the software used by the company and was unable to come to any conclusion about its fool-proof nature.

After the embarrassing problems of the vote count in Florida during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, with all those ``dangling chads'' and other hassles of primitive punched card-based voting machines, legislators passed the ``Help America Vote Act (HAVA)'' of 2002 which mandated electronic voting by 2006 and created a $ 4 billion fund to make this happen.

Unlike the semi-electronic technology adapted by India, where the balloting is electronic, but voting machines have still to be manually carried to the counting centres, the American systems use `touch screen' terminals that are ``online'' with the counting activity.

The three top makers of electronic voting systems — Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S — have had to lobby aggressively with state and city officials to get their systems accepted in time for the November 2004 Presidential poll.

However, Diebold suffered a set-back on Monday, when the state of California which had already used its machines in local elections in March, decided not to deploy electronic voting machines in the four counties where it proposed to go electronic for the November Presidential poll using 14,000 Diebold ``Accuvote'' systems.

Many local government bodies in the U.S., which are still apprehensive of the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to `hacking,' insist on what is called a `paper trail' — the ability to reconstruct the electronic vote and recount it manually. One model, by California-based ``Accupoll,'' prints out a receipt for the voter to prove that the vote has been registered.

Another, the Washington-based ``VoteHere,'' last week took the unprecedented step of putting its entire source code on the web to prove that its voting hardware might be hacked or the result otherwise distorted. Even if all these fears are allayed by November, less than 50 million Americans are expected to vote electronically; 55 million will still do it the old fashioned way by paper ballot.

Meanwhile, when the fourth phase of the elections to the Lok Sabha concludes, a total of just over 1.08 million electronic voting machines will have been deployed, to serve an electorate of 67.5 crores voting in over 7 lakh polling stations. The entire technology was conceived and designed in India, mass produced by two public sector undertakings — Bharat Electronics Ltd and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd — and geared to work off an ordinary 6-volt battery. BEL is reported to be ready to clinch deals to supply its EVMs to Singapore, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Malawi.

While the electorate in India seems to have accepted this technological change without too much hassle, at least one technologist has doubts: Satinath Choudhary, a New York-based Indian who heads the `Better Democracy Forum in Bronx, addressed an open letter to the Election Commission in March, expressing concern over the possibility that the Indian EVMs could be tampered with. The retired computer science professor's open letter is being featured on a number of websites including www.dalit.org and www.countercurrents.org. The Linux Journal (www.linuxjournal.com ) carries a report today by Goa-based journalist Frederick Noronha, that Prof. Choudhary has filed a public interest litigation case in the Supreme Court asking for light to be thrown on the working of the BEL/ECIL EVMs, with a suggestion that the systems provide a `paper trail' if they are to have credibility.

The software code that drives the EVMs has never been made public by either BEL or ECIL — so it is not possible for other experts to judge how failsafe it is — so runs the argument of those who seek more openness in the matter. It was during a by-election in the North Paravur constituency of Kerala in 1982, that an electronic voting machine was used for the first time in India. It was an idea ahead of its time.

The losing candidate, A.C. Jose of the Congress, successfully overturned the result in court, on the technicality that the Representation of the People Act did not allow for electronic voting. The lacuna was soon made good by Parliament — and EVMs were used successfully during Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi in 1998.

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