Security of India's electronic voting questioned

Security of India's electronic voting questioned

By Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 17, 2010; 7:20 PM

NEW DELHI - The world's largest democracy celebrated its transition from paper ballots to electronic voting six years ago, with officials praising a simple voting machine made in India as part of a great democratic leap forward.

But a growing number of critics are questioning the reliability of the machines, and some voters complain that buttons stick and lights flash on the wrong candidate when they cast ballots electronically. Some politicians have expressed doubts about the results of elections in the past two years.

Similar complaints have forced several countries, including the United States, to reconsider moves away from paper. The Netherlands, Ireland and Germany decided to do away with their machines.

But in India, which has an electorate larger than the population of the United States, Australia and the 50 countries of Europe combined, many fear that going back to paper could mean a return to days-long vote counts and frequent allegations of fraud. The controversy carries great weight in India, where pride in the democratic system hinges on the fairness of its elections.

In April, in the southern city of Hyderabad, an Indian IT engineer, Hari Prasad, and a professor from the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman, replaced the display unit of a machine with a cheap look-alike fitted with Bluetooth radio, then used a wireless signal to remotely change the count.

"We showed that India's electronic voting system is neither transparent nor secure and can be tampered with. Even a regular radio mechanic can do it," Prasad said.

The demonstration landed Prasad in jail for several days on charges that he had hacked a stolen government voting machine.

But after the results of his experience were posted on YouTube and broadcast on Indian television, many political parties wrote the Election Commission expressing fears about tampering. They also requested new machines that can spew out paper records of the votes cast.

The commission recently said it would consider incorporating a small paper printout to boost public confidence. But officials insist that the simple technology used in the machines make them tamperproof.

"Even though we are an IT superpower, the strength of our machine is its simplicity. Our machines are the cheapest in the world, a little over $200 each," said S.Y. Quraishi, India's chief election commissioner. "With electronic voting, we have eliminated booth-capturing, stuffing the ballot box with rigged votes and malpractices on the counting table."

Bhutan and Nepal used Indian-made machines in their recent elections, and Bangladesh, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and South Korea have expressed interesting in buying them, he said.

The Indian machines go through several tiers of checks and security seals before polling. "The machines may be failing elsewhere in the world, but they are working fine in India. The world can come and learn from us," Quraishi said.

But G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, who studies elections and wrote the book "Democracy at Risk," said India's machines "are not transparent, verifiable and auditable."

"With such a machine, the result we get is faith-based and not evidence-based," he said.

Rao, who petitioned the Supreme Court last year against the machines, said the results from the past two national elections did not correspond to exit polls.

Some candidates have expressed their doubts, too.

Last year, Congress Party leader Alok Jena filed a court case against his opponent in the eastern state of Orissa and asked a judge to cancel the result and hold another election. He said 56 voting machines used in his constituency had numbers that did not match the official count given by the Election Commission.

Voting machines were used for the first time to elect the village council head in rural Teekli in the northern state of Haryana in July.

Soon after the voting, one machine mysteriously disappeared for two hours, several candidates and voters recalled. When the machine reappeared, it showed that one candidate, Ram Kishan Yadav, had won only 14 votes on it. The waiting villagers erupted in anger.

"Many villagers started saying they had voted for me," Yadav said. "We had experienced massive fraud with the paper ballot system for many years. We thought machines are flawless and cannot be tampered with. But the machine stole my votes.

"If human intentions are wrong," he said, "then everything can be manipulated."