“Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything”
- Joseph Stalin
This quote of Stalin may make you smile with its brazenness, and perhaps some may feel a little smug in the thought that they are living in a society that conducts itself in a more civilized manner. But Stalin, being a consummate practitioner of power politics, knew what he was talking about, and his maxim is very much relevant to us in India today.
The fact is that on election day, you may press a button on the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and see the flash of the adjacent light, but you really have no way to ascertain that your vote will go to the candidate of your choice, and that the election is being conducted fairly. There is evidence to suggest that the voters are indeed being duped. D.S. Kulkarni, a prominent real estate magnate and well-known citizen of Pune, had contested the 2009 Lok Sabha election. He has narrated:
“A total of 43 family members, including two of my bosom-friends, cast their votes at Sant Namdeo School. But the EVM showed that I received only 18 votes. And there are more such examples.”
Another well-known case is that of Dr. Subramanian Swamy, who, in 2009, in the Madurai Lok Sabha constituency, received, in many booths, fewer votes than the number of volunteers he had working for him for him!
It may surprise you to know that the software on the chip at the heart of the EVMs is installed at the premises of the foreign manufacturer, and that there is no way to verify the installed software on Indian soil. There is also no way to verify that malicious features have not been incorporated into the hardware. Although we will not, in this article, go into the technical details, interested readers are invited to read this report, which describes the vulnerabilities and shows how the safeguards being followed by are wholly inadequate.
Those who have been following the EVM issue may wonder whether this matter was not settled by the recent Supreme Court judgment in the case Dr. Subramanian Swamy vs. Election Commission of India (ECI), in which Dr. Swamy had asked for the “paper trail” feature to be incorporated into EVMs. (EVMs with the paper trail facility print a slip for each vote, which is verified by the voter. These slips are collected in a drop box, like traditional paper ballots. The electronic tally can be verified by counting these slips.) There were certainly some positive headlines in the media at the time of that judgment, for example this report from Zee news:
SC wants EVM paper trail for next general election
Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 13:10
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Election Commission to introduce paper trail in electronic voting machines (EVMs).
The court directed the EC to introduce paper trail in a phased manner so that the same could be in place for the next General Elections.
Many people may have been lulled into complacency by such reports. But if you look at the fine print of the judgment, the picture is different. The Supreme Court has indeed declared that the paper trail facility is “indispensable for free and fair elections”, and that voters can have no faith in EVMs without it. At the same time, the SC has given the ECI the liberty to introduce the paper trail gradually, in phases, while remaining silent about how elections should be conducted in the absence of the paper trail facility. There is absolutely no commitment from the ECI about implementation of the paper trail for the 2014 general election. In fact, the judgment notes that the ECI had placed orders for only 450 paper trail units, and was hoping to get sanction from the Government of India to order another 20,000 units, as against a requirement of at least 1 million units.
Soon after the Supreme Court has given its judgment, the paper trail facility was used on a small scale in the Mizoram assembly elections, and a large number of those units suffered failures. Clearly, the ECI will go through a prolonged process of getting the design of the paper trail units modified, undertaking further trials, using them on small scale, suffering further failures, scaling up production, and so on. It has now been almost four years since the ECI, under pressure from political parties, formed its ‘Expert Committee’ for introduction of the paper trail. At this rate, it is very conceivable that not only the 2014 general election, but also the 2019 general election will largely be conducted with the same old opaque, paper-less EVMs.
Dr. Swamy is very much aware of the limitations of the judgment. On the day of the judgment, he had tweeted –
Subramanian Swamy @Swamy39 Oct 8
In case ECI does not use the new VVPAT EVM in some constituencies, I urge 64 PTs of that constituency to file nominations as Independents.
Dr. Swamy’s suggestion seeks to exploit the loophole that the EVMs are designed to cater to at most 64 candidates. This has been done before, in the by-election held in Andhra Pradesh in July 2010. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) was able to force the ECI to use paper ballots in several constituencies by fielding large numbers of dummy candidates. However, that is a less than satisfactory solution. Moreover, I have heard that the ECI is modifying the design of the EVMs so as to handle up to 512 candidates, which would make Dr. Swamy’s suggestion prohibitively expensive and impractical.
The legal and constitutional argument against paper-less EVMs is very strong. The notion of transparency is inherent in democracy. If a regime-appointed Election Commission demands that voters rely on blind faith, and if elections cannot be seen to be fair, then democracy is reduced to a farce, and Stalin’s blunt assertion holds true. An important legal precedent was set by the German Constitutional Court in 2009, which in a landmark judgment, effectively banned the use of paper-less EVMs, saying –
“In a republic, elections are a matter for the entire people and a joint concern of all citizens. Consequently, the monitoring of the election procedure must also be a matter for and a task of the citizen. Each citizen must be able to comprehend and verify the central steps in the elections reliably and without any special prior technical knowledge.”
This logic is undisputable. Further, the German Constitutional Court said --
“The principle of the public nature of elections, which results from the fundamental decisions of constitutional law in favour of democracy … prescribes that all essential steps of an election are subject to the possibility of public scrutiny …
The use of voting machines which electronically record the voters’ votes … only meets the constitutional requirements if the essential steps of the voting and of the ascertainment of the result can be examined reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject. … The voters themselves must be able to understand without detailed knowledge of computer technology whether their votes cast are recorded in an unadulterated manner as the basis of vote counting …”
The point is that mere assurances from high officials are not sufficient. The voters should be able to see for themselves that the elections are being conducted fairly. This position has, in spirit, been endorsed by the Supreme Court of India too, by its decision that a paper trail is “indispensible for free and fair elections”.
Although it is true that there is a degree of risk no matter what method is used for voting, the German Constitutional Court had pointed out an important difference between EVMs and paper ballots: With traditional paper ballots, any fraud (such as ballot box stuffing) is easily noticeable and is localized. Whereas, with electronic voting, fraud is extremely hard to detect and can have widespread consequences.
So, what is needed is that the Supreme Court plug the gap, by declaring that even if the Election Commission is unable, for any reason, to provide the paper trail facility with EVMs, it remains constitutionally obliged to conduct free and fair elections. This is, as already decided by the Supreme Court, impossible with paper-less EVMs. The only other constitutionally valid option, that provides the transparency that is essential for democracy, is to use traditional paper ballots. In fact, it can be said that continued use of paper-less EVMs by the ECI amounts to a contemptuous disregard of the Supreme Court’s finding on the indispensability of a paper trail.
It would perhaps have been best for Dr. Swamy to have immediately approached the Supreme Court again, asking it to urgently plug the above-mentioned gap, especially in view of the impending general election of 2014. However, he has not felt it appropriate to do this so far.
In this situation, a few concerned citizens got together (under the name Technology Transparency Foundation) and filed a Writ Petition in the Supreme Court asking it to direct the Election Commission to use paper ballots in the absence of EVMs with the paper trail facility. Unfortunately, this Writ Petition was dismissed by the Supreme Court at the first hearing, on the ground that the earlier decision in Swamy vs. ECI “covers and takes care of all aspects”. This is most certainly not the case. Now, a review petition has been filed, which is available online here.
The revelations by American whistleblower Edward Snowden should forcefully remind us that many nations are engaged in intense cyber-warfare, on a routine basis. EVMs are a much more attractive target than defense or communications systems. If a nation is so lax as to allow its election machinery to depend on imported computer systems, with no effective checks in place, then foreign interests can hardly be blamed if they seek to exploit that opportunity, possibly in collaboration with their favorite domestic actors.
Taking a step back from the immediate problem of non-transparent voting, we see an eco-system of corrosive forces afflicting the nation. Masses being manipulated through corrupt media companies. Interventions in our political system by activists incubated through foreign funding. A compromised political leadership, holding ill-gotten assets abroad, and thus vulnerable to blackmail. An Election Commission appointed by the same corrupt leadership. While loot continues on a stupendous scale, the poor live in utter wretchedness. The fact that a former police officer, against whom there are credible allegations of sabotaging India’s cryogenic rocket engine program at the behest of foreign interests, continues to walk around free, suggests that the rot is so deep that the state is unable to defend itself against treason. In these circumstances, can we really call ourselves an independent nation? Or are we again a colony, this time with brown-skinned viceroys? These are not idle questions. In today’s age, neo-colonialism functions somewhat more subtly than the colonialism of past centuries. (Former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov has many interesting points to make in this 81 minute video.)
Given what is publicly known about international cyber-warfare, it would be gravely negligent to tolerate the use of EVMs with foreign installed software, in which neither the software nor hardware are verifiable. Under normal circumstances, it would be the duty of the opposition to raise the issue of verifiable voting. In the immediate aftermath of the 2009 election, LK Advani did raise the issue, but he has been silent thereafter. Dr. Swamy took the issue up legally, but the matter has so far not been taken it to its logical conclusion. BJP Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi has, as far as I know, not mentioned the issue publicly even once, even though he has been briefed about it by senior journalist Madhav Nalapat. Modi certainly has the capacity to raise the issue forcefully. Imagine what the effect would be if Modi were to denounce paper-less EVMs in his huge rallies. Or if Modi were to ask people to gather in large numbers and demonstrate outside the Election Commission. There is no way the EC would be able to resist that kind of popular pressure. And there is no way that anybody would be able to criticize Modi for doing that, because the Supreme Court itself has declared that free and fair elections are not possible with paper-less EVMs. It must also be said that if Narendra Modi fails to take up this issue, then he will have to bear some of the blame for the lack of verifiable voting in India, and any consequent mis-governance and human misery.
To an extent the continuation of non-transparent voting in India is also a failure of society as a whole. There certainly are many who are concerned, but many more are not bothered. Some argue that the EVMs must be all right, since the BJP also manages to win time to time. What explains this attitude? Partly, it could be the influence of the media, which never questions the credibility of EVMs. People don’t like to be taken out of their mental comfort zones. It could also be that after centuries of colonization, there has been a decline in the level of strategic thinking in society. Perhaps we were far more advanced in the days of Chanakya than we are today. Needless to say, we cannot escape from the timeless laws of nature. The fittest will survive, the unfit will perish and eternal vigilance will always be the price of liberty.
To conclude, let us not to be complacent about our democracy and independence. In fact, as per the Supreme Court itself, we are not a democracy, if democracy means free and fair elections. We should also question how independent we really are. Arguably, we may be less free than we were before 1947, because, in that era, the slavery was at least obvious. Today, too many of the middle-class, being drugged by mass-media indoctrination, do not identify and focus on crucial issues. “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”, as the German philosopher Goethe observed.
The effort for transparent voting can be taken forward through several avenues – litigation, pressuring political parties to take a clear and active stand, and public outreach through the traditional and social media. As was mentioned earlier, there is a pending review petition. It is important for all those who care about this issue to get together and pool their efforts. Those who wish to join the effort, or just stay in touch, are welcome to register at
http://tiny.cc/no2evms . You can also help by sharing the link to this article via email and social media. Let there be no doubt that if we want our nation to awake into Tagore’s “heaven of freedom” where “the mind is without fear and the head is held high”, then the problem of verifiable voting is something we will have to sort out first.See: ("Video describing some demonstrated attacks on a genuine Indian EVM")
