Massive protests by Lawyers and other groups at Jantar Mantar and other places in the national capital have once again reminded us of the recommendations of the report of The Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE) chaired by former Supreme Court Judge, Justice Madan Lokur. The report recommended redesigning of EVMs and VVPAT and auditing to ensure transparency.
The committee members believe that implementation of CCE recommendations will help make our electoral system more transparent and revive people’s faith in Election Commission, electoral process and Parliamentary democracy. On January 30, 2021 the committee released a report on the fallibility or ‘vulnerability’ of EVMs and VVPAT, saying that EVM voting should abide by ‘democracy principle’.
Tracing back the tampering of the Enigma Machine (The Code Maker) invented by Hitler’s cryptography scientists to ensure military orders could never be leaked to the enemy, one can clearly understand the vulnerability and the dangers attached to EVMs and the mounting demand to replace them with ballot papers.
The moral of the Enigma Machine story is that there’s nothing that one set of scientists can create which another set of technical staff, given time and resources, will not crack. According to some of the best brains in computers, the same is true of digital machines, encrypts, EVMs, software such as WhatsApp or even IOS, that governments cannot break, or haven’t already. Guarantees of end-to-end encryption are so much faff.
“In the Electoral Democracy and CCE groups, retired judges and former senior civil servants, we also had arguably the most brilliant brains alive working at the cutting edge of computer sciences. All of them were of the opinion that there was no machine, EVM and VVPAT included, which could be safe from hacking. The question would be how difficult or easy the task would be, and how fast it could be done. The science of encryption and the method of hacking is not the only problem with EVMs,” said John Dayal, noted human rights defender who was on CCE.
“There are sound arguments why even the most developed democracies in the world, and the richest and most educated, including the USA, UK, many European nations, and Japan, still use the good old method of paper ballots where the choice is made by hand, and remains visible to the person marking the paper, and all the way till the results are counted and announced. Errors in marking occur, as do election malpractices such as forcible capture of a polling both, or destroying ballot papers, but they are issues of law and order,” said Dayal.
Prof Arun Kumar, a noted economist and CCE member said, “Fairness of election is the most important thing for a democracy because democracy is all about representation; if elections are not fair, the representation cannot be fair either. So, we have to ensure that the mechanism by which elections are held should be legitimate and fair. We know the ballot paper that was used earlier with the ballot box had many malpractices like booth capturing, fake votes, etc. Therefore, it was decided to use EVMs. But EVMs also do not solve the problem because the voter doesn’t know whether a candidate whom one has voted for has got the vote.”
So, VVPATs were introduced, enabling a voter to see a slip through a glasscover showing who he has voted for. Prof Kumar added, “Suppose you have an objection, how do you prove even if you see there was something wrong? By the time you call the election booth officer to object, it will be too late since the slip is visible only for 7 seconds. Further, if you cannot prove wrongdoing, you can be fined Rs.5000 for a false claim. Therefore, voters do not complain. Thus, VVPAT dropping in the box is not a solution to the problem – one cannot be sure if one’s vote has been correctly registered.”
“It was suggested that VVPAT should be enhanced so that the slip comes into the hand of the voter who can then satisfy himself and then drop it into a ballot box…. This can ensure substantial transparency even though some malpractices may persist, like disfranchisement of voters who may vote against the ruling party, officials in election booths can be in connivance with one party or another, election agents of other parties may be bought out and so on. Therefore, CCE recommendations should be seriously taken care of to ensure greater transparency,” opined Kumar.
India has universalized the EVM in its Parliamentary and Assembly elections. Now and then, new scandals expose the weakness of this electronic route in making political choices. The most serious one is the control of machines being with outsiders. There are reports of tens of thousands of these machines being faulty, or they have been seen being carried in private vehicles.
The patents of the technology and hardware in these machines are long expired. How does the government reassure the country that public sector industries have valid patent rights to manufacture EVMs in a secure manner?
“The Election Commission of India, guardian of the country’s democratic processes together with the courts and the President, has through the years, particularly during the last ten years, been very cagey on coming out publicly on this. A former chief election commissioner, SY Qureshi, who is a member of group, told us that when technical experts spoke in the Election Commission on EVMs, the civil servants did not have a full understanding of the matter. The commission adopted the machines, trusting the technical assurances by government agencies and manufacturers,” said Dayal.
VVPAT is not used in every booth. It is barely used in a handful of booths in constituencies and in a random manner. This becomes meaningless when we are talking of lakhs of machines in the 543 constituencies taking part in Lok Sabha elections. Also, VVPAT is brought in conjunction with the voting device using a laptop computer. Each commissioning of an EVM or VVPAT means a human intervention. India does not manufacture the complex chips used, and conspiracy theorists can talk of remote control of the machines.
Wajahat Habibullah, Vice Chair of CCE, said, “As a person who has been part of that system, we have taken pride in our election system from the election commission right down to the vote-casting procedure. In initial years of our independence, there were cases where you know voting has been rigged….”
He added, “As Chief Information Commissioner, it appeared to me through the studies that there was a vagueness about the electoral process, which cannot be allowed. Because complete transparency and complete accountability, which are the principles of RTI, are applicable for the primary institution of the Election Commission and the working of the election system.”
“India, which is proud of its democratic framework, cannot allow even a faint doubt about its fairness and freedom of its election. So, we were really demanding, yes go ahead with the EVM process, but then compare it to VVPAT, 100 percent and not only one percent as said by the court,” said Habibullah.