It is now confirmed that IIT tag cannot guarantee the intelligence of its products. None other than Prime Minister of Delhi proved it. He arranged the hacking of a device that looked like an EVM. Forget what Election Commission said in dismissing his claims of hacking an EVM and for a moment, let us concede he had the ‘intelligence’ and ‘means’ to hack a real EVM. So, all he could prove was the vulnerability of (dummy) EVM. So, what does Kejriwal suggest as an alternative?
After the fiasco in the Delhi Assembly, his government passed a resolution requesting the President of India (only post, he so far has not assumed) that future elections shall be conducted using only EVMs with Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail machines.
What is the difference between the current EVM and EVM-VVPAT that Kejriwal proposes?
The voter gets a printout (much like the receipt we get at ATM after withdrawing money) displaying the party/candidate details to whom he voted and the machine registered.
Now, I’ll tell you how I will hack this machine if someone provides me with all the means, including a programmer, for many years have passed since I wrote an actual code.
Let me explain the procedure. As all the buttons on the EVM are only inputs to the processor and storage, the machine is supposed to sense the input from the voter and store in in the memory. Then, the processor fetches the details from the memory and sends it to the printer as output.
If I plan to hack it, I’ll modify the program so that the processor directly sends the input from the voter to the printer, while registering the vote to the preferred Party in the memory. The voter is satisfied after verifying the slip as it shows the same party/candidate he voted for. So, he can never complain.
After counting if more voters from a ward come with their slips and claim the candidate they voted for had got less number of votes, despite the tally of slips in their hands is more, what should be the answer? Simple. You claim that those people have got these slips printed by some other machine and this is simply a ridiculous charge by the lost candidate. Hell, the candidate will spend his remaining life proving the slips are original and not fake. If EVMs can be hacked, printing slips is easier and so it too can be done, by the same logic – especially when ethics have no place in politics.
Security is a sense of confidence that people have in the system based on its past performance. Before Arvind was in politics, it was his assurance that gave a confidence to the Delhi people when they elected him. It is that sense of confidence he lost in the last two and half years, by his continuous ignoring of Delhi’s problems, while he was busy enhancing his dreams elsewhere.
Remember the election days before TN Seshan? How booth capturing used to happen and staff were kicked out of the booth so the goons can vote for their masters? In how many booths, water, paint, kerosene was poured into the ballot boxes? Does Arvind really want to go to that stone age of elections? If he really thinks so, he would be qualified to lead the retrograde ISIS in India, as only their vision comes close to his.
So, if Arvind Kejriwal wishes to really provide an alternative to the present generation of EVMs, he should join Apple, Goole, Microsoft, TCS and Infy, work for some five decades and make one machine that cannot be hacked. At least a person like me who has not written code for more than a decade should not get an idea about to hack the new machine. Till, that time, I request Kejriwal to leave politics and concentrate on developing a hack proof EVM so that democracy in all parts of the world can be saved from unscrupulous politicians like him.