EC struggles to allay doubts on EVM

While BJP by all accounts is facing a backlash in Gujarat, there are enough people on the ground who believe it would still win the assembly election by manipulating the electronic voting machines. While the Election Commission of India has been consistent in claiming that EVMs cannot be tampered with, increasingly there are fewer takers for such claims.

What if BJP loses the election in Gujarat? Will that be conclusive proof that EVMs cannot be tampered? Such questions have gained currency in the wake of reports that BJP is finding itself cornered in the state. But if it were to win again, would the victory be necessarily dubious and achieved through tampering the with the EVMs?

A conclusive answer is clearly unlikely even after the results are declared on December 18. What is however certain is that the Election Commission has a task in hand in restoring the credibility of the Electronic Voting Machines.

Also because Bharatiya Janata Party itself had campaigned till about 2013 against EVMs. BJP spokesperson GVLN Rao in fact wrote a book suggesting that democracy was in peril because of EVMs. But since 2012 the BJP and Rao have been quiet, prompting several observers to ask whether Rao and other BJP supporters have been putting their theoretical knowledge to practice.

While writing the book, Rao had collaborated with a Dutch hacker and an American computer scientist. The book, which is still available on the Net along with video displays and photographs, had described in detail how the EVM could be hacked.

But whatever be the reason for BJP and Rao’s silence since then, there is little doubt that EVMs have become the butt of many joke. A tweet this week summed up the national mood when it said, “Media is the fourth pillar of democracy. EVM is the fifth...”

In Gujarat, doubts about EVMs were first raised in 2010 after the local body elections. Media reports had then recorded: “In Padra, all the votes cast in favour of the Congress were registered for the BJP. This blunder was observed by a voter when he cast his vote for the Congress, but the EVM flashed the light next to the BJP symbol. The voter complained to the presiding officer. The presiding officer and other election officers observed the mistake and voting was immediately stopped…”

“In his report, the presiding officer wrote: “After polling by 44 persons, the machine registered 111 votes. After this in the polling unit 12311/0905 when one presses button for voting, there is light in front of another candidate. As per the submission of voters, when one polls vote for Congress, there is light on the BJP candidate.”

Girish Parmar, the state Congress general secretary, alleged that technocrats with laptops were sent by the BJP to tamper with the EVMs. He said: “The EPROM can be easily intercepted through Bluetooth or the RS-232 Port Serial Data Cable.”

KJ Rao, former election commissioner and founder of FAME, said the EC is not responsible for the conduct of civic polls. It is the state election commission which supervises the local elections. “The state EC might have procured the machines from private companies,” he said.

The then Union textile minister Shankarsinh Vaghela had then said, “Nowhere in the world can a party secure 80 per cent votes. In the six corporations, the average voting was 20 to 25 per cent. In the last hour it jumped to 45 per cent. This is doubtful. People say it was Modi magic but actually it was machine magic.” Another leader was quoted as saying, “Modi employed an Amercian expert in this election to tamper with

the EVMs.”

Doubts have increased manifold following the results of Uttar Pradesh local body elections declared late in November. While the BJP celebrated the victory of 14 of its 16 Mayoral candidates, and TV news channels gushed about the BJP’s sweep, the complete result showed that while BJP indeed won the Mayor’s office in 14 of the 16 municipal corporations, it had received a drubbing in municipalities and other local bodies for which ballot papers were used in the election. EVMs were used in the Mayoral election.

So much so that Swati Chaturvedi, writing for the NDTV website, reported that a clutch of opposition leaders are planning to jointly boycott the upcoming Karnataka assembly election next year unless the Election Commission decides to junk the EVMs in favour of paper ballots.

While the current Gujarat election will see the use of “ second generation of EVMs”, Election Commission officials maintain that software tampering of EVMs is not possible and there is only a 3-4% chance of hardware malfunctioning. “The security system also involves a two-stage randomisation process in which machines will be randomly selected before reaching a

polling station to ensure that the machines are not pre-programmed to favour a particular candidate,” the officials claimed.

Following reports of over 3,000 ballot units being found faulty in the First Level Checks (FLC) conducted by the Gujarat state election commission in October-November, several opposition leaders had petitioned the Gujarat high court for adequate safeguards.

The EC however told the high court that most damages were caused in transportation of the units.