While campaigning in the Gujarat elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made this statement on December 2, 2022: “The way Congress has started blaming Electronic Voting Machines after yesterday’s voting in Kutch, Saurashtra and south Gujarat, it is evident the opposition party has conceded defeat and has accepted that the BJP will win the election.”

Is the prime minister sending out a message that EVMs are infallible and the results they produce cannot be questioned?

If so, where are the voters who are the sovereign in a democracy? Are they to be rendered as mere zombies and ‘button-pressing’ robots with the machines doing the job of transferring the sovereignty?

The question arises because of the ocean of difference between machine-voting and manual-voting. This can be better understood by comparing the process under the earlier paper-ballot and the present EVM system.

Under the paper-ballot system, the voter had distinct opportunities to physically examine and verify as to whether his or her candidate and the corresponding symbol is on the ballot. Counting is done manually in the presence of the Returning Officer (RO) and candidates’ agents. Disputes if any, are resolved on the spot with the intervention of the RO. This verifiability gives knowledge and satisfaction to the voter that he or she has transferred the sovereignty to the candidate of his or her choice.

In case of electoral dispute, physical reconstruction of the vote for authentication is possible.

Under the electronic voting system, everything is done inside a machine in a non-transparent manner without exam-inability, verifiability, knowledge and satisfaction as to whether sovereignty has been transferred to the candidate of the voter’s choice. All that the voter do is to press a button, see a blip, hear a sound and a chance to look at a paper-slip for seven seconds. He or she has no idea whether the vote has been registered and if so to whom. He or she has no assurance that the slip was counted as such or was manipulated between voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) and EVM.

In case of electoral dispute, physical reconstruction of the vote for authentication is not possible.

Over the last few years, there is ample material in public domain questioning the sanctity of India’s electoral process mainly due to the severe flaws in EVM voting and VVPAT counting. These do not comply with essential electoral and democracy principles which stipulate that each voter have the knowledge and capacity to verify that his or her vote is cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and counted-as-recorded.

These ‘essential principles’ were laid down by the German constitutional court in 2009 where EVM voting was challenged. Here is an extract from the judgment:

“The votes were exclusively recorded on an electronic storage medium after the ballot. Neither the voter nor the returning committees, nor the citizens present in the polling station, were able to check whether the votes cast were recorded by the voting machines without falsification. Using the display on the control unit, the returning committees could only recognise whether the voting machines registered a ballot, but not whether the votes were recorded by the voting machines without changing the content in any way. The voting machines did not provide a possibility to record the votes independently of the electronic record on the vote storage module enabling the respective voter to check his or her ballot.

“The essential steps in the ascertainment of the results by the voting machines also could not be verified by the public. Since this formed the object of a data processing procedure running inside the voting machines, it was possible for neither the election bodies nor the citizens participating in the ascertainment of the results to verify whether the valid votes cast were correctly allotted to the electoral proposals and the votes accounted for by the individual electoral proposals in total were correctly ascertained. It was not sufficient that the result of the computing process implemented in the voting machine could be taken note of using a summary paper printout or an electronic display. A public examination by means of which the citizen could have reliably verified the ascertainment of the election result himself or herself without prior special technical knowledge was hence ruled out.”

On these grounds, EVM voting was declared unconstitutional and the whole of Europe want back to the paper ballot. Most of USA followed suit. Based on the above reasoning even the ‘lowly’ Pakistan rejected the proposal to adopt EVM voting!

In India, around that time, a different scenario was playing out on the same issue.

G.V. L. Narasimha Rao, at present the BJP Rajya Sabha MP, published a book titled Democracy at Risk! Can We Trust Our Electronic Voting Machines? in 2010 for which the BJP founder and its senior most leader, L.K. Advani, wrote an approving foreword strongly advocating for the VVPAT to be introduced immediately.

BJP trouble-shooter Subramanian Swamy jumped into the fray and challenged the EVM in the Delhi high court.

In January 2012, the Delhi high court gave a judgment wherein it expressed reservations on EVM: “Dr. Swamy is right to the extent that it cannot be ruled out that EVMs may be vulnerable to frauds. There may be security issues as well.”

Swamy moved the Supreme Court and got an order on October 8, 2013, to have the VVPAT in every EVM. Pursuant to this judgment and other directions, ECI arranged for all EVMs to be accompanied with VVPAT for the 2019 parliament elections.

That is when the real trouble started.

Kannan Gopinathan, the computer scientist turned civil servant, who was Returning Officer in the 2019 Parliament election puts it sharply: “The jugaad-like manner in which the VVPAT-machine has been inserted into India’s electronic voting process has endangered security; the process safeguards that were earlier designed to protect EVMs are now of little value.”

In his thesis written from practical experience he specifically asks:

“If EVM-VVPATs are stand-alone machines not connected to any external device, as repeatedly claimed by the Election Commission of India (ECI), how does the VVPAT machine print the name and symbol of the chosen candidate? When and how are the names and symbols of the candidates uploaded on to the VVPAT? Does this affect the technical, physical and procedural security claims of our electronic voting process?”

But the ECI has not bothered to answer because they have none.

So, the Citizens Commission on Elections (CCE) placed this vexatious issue before a panel of top national/international experts which included the following people:

• Ronald L. Rivest, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA;
• J. Alex Halderman, professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, USA;
• Poorvi L. Vora, professor of Computer Science, George Washington University, USA;
• Philip B. Stark, professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, USA;
• Vanessa Teague, associate professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Australia;
• Sandeep Shukla, professor of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur; and
• R. Ramanujam, professor of Computer Science, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

Their depositions were coordinated by Subhasis Bannerji, professor of Computer Science, IIT, Delhi and member of the CCE. Their findings are categoric.

These findings were deliberated in detail at the ‘Joint Civil Society-Political Parties Conference’ held at the Constitution Club, New Delhi on August 13, 2022.

The following resolutions were unanimously passed:

1) EVMs cannot be assumed to be tamper-proof. The voting process should be redesigned to be software and hardware independent in order to be verifiable or auditable.

2) The VVPAT system should be re-designed to be fully voter-verified. A voter should be able to get the VVPAT slip and cast it in a chip-free ballot box for the vote to be valid and counted. This should not require interaction with any authorities and should not depend in any way on assumptions of correctness of machines.

3) The integrity of the VVPAT slips and the EVM machines during the entire time after polling and before counting and auditing must be ensured in a manner that is verifiable. The VVPAT slips must be printed in such a manner that they can be preserved for a minimum of five years.

4) There must be stringent audit of the electronic tally for every constituency before the results are declared. The audit should be based on full manual counting of the VVPAT slips to improve voter confidence. Forms 17A and Forms 17C must be tallied and be publicly disclosed at the end of polling on the polling day itself. Forms 17A and 17C should also be tallied with the manual count of VVPAT printouts.

5) There is need to move away from certification of voting equipment and processes and demonstrate that the outcome of an election is correct irrespective of machines and trust on custody chains of EVMs and VVPATs. This can be done by adopting well established strategies for risk-limiting audits or by using a provably end-to-end verifiable cryptographic protocol, or both. The ECI should explore the possibilities.

6) The EVM voting and counting system design should be subjected to independent (of the government and ECI) review and the integrity of the election process should be subjected to independent audit. The findings should be made public and all design details should be transparent and publicly available.

The findings and resolution were duly communicated to the ECI has blissfully ignored it. It looks as if the constitutional body is content and happy with the machines seemingly doing the voting and counting, and citizens remaining passive button-pushers.

They have little or no concern for the transfer of sovereignty or compliance with electoral or democracy principles.

In the event, is India’s democracy morphing from the will of the people to the whim of the machines? The jury is out.

(M.G. Devasahayam is a former Army and IAS officer and coordinator of Citizen’s Commission on Elections. Courtesy: The Wire.)