Indian Voting Machines - Security Problems

Security Problems

An international conference on the Indian EVMs and its tamperability of the said machines was held under the Chairmanship of Dr. Subramanian Swamy, President of the Janata Party and former Union Cabinet Minister for Law, Commerce and Justice at Chennai on 13 February 2010. This conference received good response and the conclusion was that the Election Commission of India was shirking its responsibility on the transparency in the working of the EVMs.

In April 2010, an independent security analysis was released by a research team led by Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and J. Alex Halderman. The study included video demonstrations of two attacks that the researchers carried out on a real EVM, as well as descriptions of several other potential vulnerabilities.

• Before voting: One demonstration attack was based on replacing the part inside the control unit that actually displays the candidates' vote totals. The study showed how a substitute, "dishonest" part could output fraudulent election results. This component can be programmed to steal a percentage of the votes in favour of a chosen candidate.
• After voting: The second demonstration attack used a small clip-on device to manipulate the vote storage memory inside the machine. Votes stored in the EVM between the election and the public counting session can be changed by using a specially made pocket-sized device. When you open the machine, you find micro-controllers, under which are electrically enabled programs, with 'read-only' memory. It is used only for storage. However, you can read and write memory from an external interface. The researchers developed a small clip with a chip on the top to read votes inside the memory and manipulate the data by swapping the vote from one candidate to another.

In order to mitigate these threats, the researchers suggest moving to a voting system that provides greater transparency, such as paper ballots, precinct count optical scan, or a voter verified paper audit trail, since, in any of these systems, skeptical voters could, in principle, observe the physical counting process to gain confidence that the outcome is fair.

But Election Commission of India points out that for such tampering of the EVMs, one needs physical access to EVMs, and pretty high tech skills are required. Given that EVMs are stored under strict security which can be monitored by candidates or their agents all the time, its impossible to gain physical access to the machines. Plus, to impact the results of an election, hundreds to thousands of machines will be needed to tamper with, which is almost impossible given the hi-tech and time consuming nature of the tampering process.