The Hindu : Electronic ballots: As U.S. agonises, India surges ahead

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003

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National

Electronic ballots: As U.S. agonises, India surges ahead

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore July 29. In one of the ironies of the Internet Age, India's expertise with electronic voting machines (EVMs) is being watched with great interest by countries such as Malaysia and the U.K. with a view to introducing similar systems back home - even as a technology leader such as the United States still agonises over whether to go in for e-voting.

The Election Commissioner, T.S. Krishnamurthy, said in Ranchi on Monday that the next general elections — likely to take place in or before September 2004 — would be India's first all-electronic poll, using over 8 lakh EVMs, and making photo identity cards mandatory.

And at the recently concluded "International Conference on Democracy" in London, Chief Election Officers of a number of Commonwealth nations, evinced keen interest in replicating the Indian experiment in electronic voting. Some of the nations planned to send observers to see EVMs in action during the next round of Assembly elections in October.

But in the U.S. last week, raging controversy surrounded a report published on the Internet by researchers at the Information Security Institute of John Hopkins University. Avi Rubin, Technical Director of the Institute and two colleagues: Yoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield and Dan Wallach, suggested that one of the electronic voting systems made by a manufacturer who had secured orders worth over $ 50 million, was "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable..."

They criticised the fact that the programme was written in C++ which they characterised as an unsafe language for such applications. They also faulted the system whereby voters are provided a smart card which they use to register their votes: One can easily change the embedded programme to allow multiple votes — and more dangerously — could influence the electronic count. "A 15-year-old could make counterfeit cards in a garage," Mr. Rubin was quoted as saying. The 34-page report in PDF format can be viewed at www.avirubin.com/vote.pdf.

The firm concerned — Diebold Election Systems has countered the allegations saying it was based on one of their earlier programmes — but the damage has been done, and the few States in the U.S., which were planning to dip their feet in the e-voting pool are now said to be doing a hasty re-think.

Such is the unease at grassroots levels about high tech elections that entire websites — like www.blackboxvoting.com (tagged "Ballot Tampering in the 21st century") have come up to provide a rallying point for the anti-electronic voting brigade.

Technology-friendly commentators are afraid that in this climate the U.S. will remain a relatively "backward" State when it comes to computerising the election process and will continue to use outmoded methods that led to the Florida recounts of the 2000 Presidential election with its notorious "dangling chad" manual recounts. They also see the wisdom of the Indian system where the EVMs still require a manual operation by the voter and do not depend on a smart card that the he or she may possess.

This effectively insulates the machine from external tampering. When EVMs were first used in India two decades ago in the North Paravur Parliamentary by-elections in Kerala, the loser, A.C. Jose, successfully challenged the result. The courts ordered a re-election — but not on the grounds that EVMs could be tampered with.

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