Some interesting issues. Could be of interest to the engineers of this list, at least from a perspective of theoretical possibilities and encouraging debate. FN
Saturday, April 17, 2004 | Updated: 02:39 IST The Big Idea: Press to play Kanishka Singh The world's grandest electoral technology shall be on display across India from April 20 to May 10, 2004, at a polling booth near you. The use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the forthcoming general elections is unprecedented. EVMs seek to make this election less expensive than in the past. Through the conservation of paper, the polls shall be more environment-friendly. They are also expected to remove the menace of invalid votes. The Election Commission calls it ?tamper-proof? and ?error-free?. There are other advantages: complete secrecy, faster counting and re-usability. Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics India Limited (EIL) are the two companies from whom the Indian government is purchasing the EVMs. Both are PSUs, majority-owned by the government. On April 12, BEL, a defence equipment manufacturer for the government ? against which sanctions had been imposed by the US after Pokhran II ? announced full year earnings for 2003-04. Revenues in 2003-04 grew by 11.3 per cent. This fiscal, EVMs accounted for approximately 9 per cent of BEL?s total revenue. For BEL, the business of democracy appears to have a higher growth trajectory than its traditional defence business. Clearly, there are positives associated with the use of EVMs. However, key questions remain unanswered. Have the severe and well-documented problems experienced with regard to the machines in the December assembly elections been addressed? Is a well-intentioned EC empowered and equipped to ensure that elections are conducted fairly and that the people?s mandate is recorded accurately on the machines? Does voter awareness of EVMs exist across the country? The EVM problems experienced in the December elections were many. None of them, however, are problems that can?t be solved. Here are the problems: ** Buttons were pressed on behalf of the voter by officials/agents who ostensibly tried to ?demonstrate? how to operate the machine. Voters, therefore, were, on occasion, innocent bystanders while their votes were cast in front of their eyes. In effect, the vote had already been cast during the demo. ** The machine was placed upside down or sideways so that a numeral-illiterate voter who knew to press the button in a certain sequence pressed the wrong button. So, if you were going to press the third button (of a total of 16 on one ballot unit) and the box was deliberately turned upside down, you ended up inadvertently casting a vote for candidate number 14! ** The ?ready lamp? on the EVM, which needs to be lit before one can cast a vote, was not lit in many cases as the presiding officer allowed a person to press the button before the machine was voter-ready. An actual vote was later cast on that person?s behalf once he/she had left the booth. ** Misinformation campaigns were run suggesting that pressing a certain candidate?s button would cause an electric shock. ** Propaganda was spread to confuse voters by disseminating a false serial number for a particular candidate. ** A candidate?s name and symbol were covered with masking tape and, therefore, made invisible to unsuspecting voters. ** Red or bright markings were made next to the name or symbol of a particular candidate to make that candidate?s label appear more prominent on the EVM. It?s the EC?s job to see to it that elections are free and fair. The election process is a massive mobilisation exercise with approximately 4 million polling staff and 1 million security personnel participating. The training of 5 million people in the procedures, contingencies and nuances of the election process is a formidable task. The harsh trainer-trainee ratio that the EC appears to be faced with is approximately 1:16,500. If you believe that it is the Indian voter (according to the latest EC figures, 670,153,348 of them) who must be trained in and made aware of EVM-use, then this ratio is an appalling 1:2,200,000. The EC is now also tasked with viewing and approving political advertisements before they are put on air. In addition to their new role as media watchdog, the EC should go national with a broad-based media campaign to create voter awareness among the largest electorate in the world. EVMs will be deployed in the upcoming elections in all the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies for the first time in an Indian general election. Voters must be familiarised with the technology and its potential pitfalls if this technological advance is to be successful. In the US, public memory remains scarred by the debacle caused by faulty voting machines in the state of Florida in 2000. This debate has not stopped raging in the public domain ever since. In December 2003, Hillary Clinton took a stand on this issue introducing a new legislation through the Protecting American Democracy Act of 2003. She said, ?You go to an ATM, you get a receipt. You play the lottery, you get a ticket. Yet when you cast your vote, you get nothing. The systems used by the people of the United States to exercise their constitutional right to vote should be as reliable as the machines people depend on to get their money. What?s required for money machines should be required for voting machines. There is no civil action more important in a democracy than voting. Yet right now, many Americans have concerns about the integrity of the electoral system. We must restore trust in our voting, and we must do it now.? Unfortunately, there is no raging debate in India over EVMs. With the exception of Bunker Roy, a Rajasthan-based development worker/leader and activist, and an abortive law suit in 2001 by Ama-rinder Singh, currently Punjab chief minister, no attention has been drawn to the pitfalls of EVMs in this election. Aldous Huxley had stated, ?Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.? One should see to it that EVMs in the coming elections don?t prove him right. If there are only two things you take away from having read this article, they should be: ** When you go into the polling booth in the next few weeks to cast your vote, make sure it is you who presses the blue button on the right of the name of your candidate of choice. Don?t let the button be pressed for you. ** Do not leave the polling booth until you see the red arrow light flash next to the button you have pressed on the ballot machine and until you hear the long beep. Otherwise, you may well be party to the greatest heist of democracy in history. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ghosts in the machine Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad (Hindustan Times, Delhi) April 25 In his article, Press to play (April 17), Kanishka Singh described the various ploys used by polling officials to have votes cast in favour of their preferred candidates by an electorate unfamiliar with electronic voting machines. But there are problems with EVMs that involve something more fundamental than the psychological stratagems used by polling officials to influence a technically illiterate electorate. The reliability of the EVMs manufactured by the public sector Bharat Electronics Limited and the Electronics Corporation of India Limited is doubtful. The software and circuits embedded in the EVMs could very well contain numerous flaws or deliberate backdoors for tampering. A maxim of software and microelectronics engineering is that all software and electronic and electromechanical systems are to be regarded as error-prone unless rigorous testing proves them to be reliable. Significantly, neither BEL nor ECIL has disclosed details of the electronic hardware and software used in their EVMs for scrutiny by neutral experts. After the election fiasco in 2000, the US passed the Help America Vote Act, which encouraged the use of EVMs. Several companies, mainly Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems and Advanced Voting Solutions manufactured EVMs which were used in local and state elections. Prominent technologists launched public campaigns questioning the reliability of EVMs manufactured by these companies. They proved that all these EVMs had serious flaws and could be used to rig elections without being detected. In an election in Dallas, EVMs made by Election Systems & Software failed to count 44,000 votes. In a local election in Iowa, EVMs made by the same company produced a count of 4 million votes in a polling booth of 300 people. In Indiana, an EVM recorded more than 144,000 votes for an electorate of 19,000. Diebold?s EVMs turned out to be a major scandal with allegations of bribery. Diebold sold its EVMs to state and local governments even though it knew that there was no security on its tabulation software to prevent someone from changing votes and erasing any trace of the activity in the audit log. Anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election ? Diebold?s employees, election staff or even hackers ? could change votes and alter the log to erase all evidence. Requests to the Election Commission for BEL and ECIL to provide details of the reliability of their EVMs brought forth the following bland assertion: ?Tamper-proof design. The EVM is designed to be tamper-proof. Each EVM comes with a sophisticated program in assembly language: a software fully sealed against outside influence. And the program is itself fused on to a customised micro-processor chip at the manufacturer?s end. This ensures that the program is rendered tamper-proof and inaccessible.? The EC, BEL and ECIL did not provide any of the circuit schematics, source code or test vectors asked for. The EVMs could contain the following flaws, which would be practically undetectable without extensive testing by experts: * Faulty logic, incorrect algorithms and data flows. * Errors in circuit design. * Errors in the software code, especially in the embedded software. * Errors, or malicious backdoors, in databases. * Malicious trapdoors in the code to enable rigging. Reliance shouldn?t be placed on demonstrations provided by the ECIL and BEL. Even without tampering, embedded software and real-time control software can behave very weirdly when they encounter situations that their programmers had not envisaged. Any experienced engineer would tell you that electronic equipment containing firmware or embedded software frequently behaves one way during a short trial, and totally differently in actual field conditions. For instance, one can write a software module that passes all trials, but manipulate the results of actual voting. One could program the EVM to accurately record votes for three hours. One could instruct it to then assign 70 per cent of all subsequent votes cast to whichever candidate was leading at the end of the first three hours, irrespective of whichever buttons the later voters actually push. Since trials and demonstrations would reasonably be expected to last less than three hours, this ?tainted? EVM would successfully pass all such tests. One could then have one's favoured candidate get all his supporters to cast their votes first thing in the morning, so that he would be the leader after three hours of polling. This was alleged to have been done in a local election in the US, but could not be proved since the audit trails had also been erased. Or one could program the EVM so that at the end of five hours of polling, it would transfer 60 per cent of the votes of the ten lowest candidates to one?s favoured candidate. Or one could program it so that it would, say, transfer every fourth vote for the Congress to the BJP. One could also manipulate the back-end databases during the counting process, as was done in the Diebold cases where it was proved that any election could be rigged, totally without detection, by tampering with the back-end databases after the votes were cast. Moreover, the EVMs could be broken into ?remotely? after the election but before the counting. All electronic circuits are subject to electromagnetic interference. Even when the EVMs are kept physically sealed in a strong room, an expert who knows the resonant frequencies of the circuits could remotely send signals to the EVMs from several kilometres away. It is highly unlikely that polling officials would continuously transport and store each and every EVM in electromagnetically shielded Faraday cages. It is also not known what vibrations and physical shocks the EVMs can withstand. After the voting, when the EVMs are being transported over bumpy rural roads, the electromechanical components (especially registers and switches), relays, and physical connectors could be reset due to the jerks. Based on the three criteria of (a) lack of a verifiable paper/manual audit trail, (b) BEL and ECIL not having provided the algorithms, source codes, embedded firmware, integrated circuit schematics, board designs and electronic component specifications, to neutral experts for independent assessments, (c) meagre evidence in actual field conditions (as opposed to short demonstrations in laboratory conditions), it cannot be unequivocally asserted that the EVMs made by BEL and ECIL are accurate and reliable. Thousands of hours of testing needs to be done, under actual field conditions, before their reliability can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is currently formulating standards that EVMs should satisfy. The Open Voting Consortium, an international group of researchers, has spent over four years developing open-source voting systems. They intend to give away their technology for free. The switch from manual voting to the EVMs might turn out to be exchanging the known flaws of booth-capturing, ballot stuffing, multiple voting, etc. for yet-to-be-known vulnerabilities. ENDS ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
