In August 2017, EVMs from multiple countries were hacked by programmers at the EVM Hacking village at the 25th conference held at Las Vegas. Indian made EVMs however, were not included as part of the event.In the same year, the Election Commission organized an open hackathon encouraging people to attempt hacking of EVMs used by the commission in various Indian elections.While the Commission announced that no attempts were made to demonstrate any vulnerabilities in the event, the registered participants claimed that the Commission made only a few select machines available and imposed additional conditions.In January 2019, a self proclaimed cyber expert based in London claimed that the results can be manipulated by using low frequency signals. The Election Commission however dismissed the allegations since the machines did not use wireless frequencies to communicate with other devices and no proof was provided by the expert to demonstrate the hacking of the devices.
Hyderabad-based engineer Hari Prasad spent a year trying to convince election officials to complete such a review, but they insisted that the government-made machines were “perfect,” "infallible," and “tamperproof.” Then, in February of this year, an anonymous source offered him access to one of the machines to study. He assembled an international research team, including J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan and Rop Gonggrijp from the Netherlands. Together, they discovered that, far from being tamper-proof, the machines suffer from serious weaknesses that could be exploited to alter national election results. Months of hot debate about these findings have produced a growing consensus that India’s electronic voting machines should be scrapped. There have also been more disturbing developments: Prasad was arrested and jailed in August by authorities demanding to know the identity of the anonymous source. He has since been released on bail, and he is visiting the U.S. to accept the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for his work.
Prasad and Halderman will describe the design and motivations behind India's electronic voting system, the technical problems their study demonstrated, the political circumstances behind Prasad's arrest, and the implications of the machines' security weaknesses for voting technology in India and beyond. They'll also discuss some of the formidable practical challenges that India and many other democracies face in conducting elections. Designing voting systems that provide transparency and security under these constraints presents many open problems.
https://indiaevm.org/ has demonstrated two kinds of attacks against a real Indian EVM. One attack involves replacing a small part of the machine with a look-alike component that can be silently instructed to steal a percentage of the votes in favour of a chosen candidate.
https://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/event/alex-halderman-security-problems-india%E2%80%99s-electronic-voting-system ujhnmb.
Hyderabad-based engineer Hari Prasad spent a year trying to convince election officials to complete such a review, but they insisted that the government-made machines were “perfect,” “infallible,” and “tamperproof.”
https://www.usenix.org/conference/evtwote-10/panel-indian-electronic-voting-machines-evms
India is one of a number of nations that deploy a uniform computerized voting system in their national elections. As the second most populous nation, the challenges of running a national election across such a diverse electorate and geography is challenging. The Indian EVM voting system is considerably more simple than voting systems in the US; it has no interactive interface, no accessibility support, and is intended to operate in elections with only one (or very few) contests on the ballot. Recently, charges of irregularities perpetrated by technically-savvy attackers have surfaced. A group of academics and advocates published a security analysis of the Indian EVM this spring that highlights a number of serious vulnerabilities and describes a few practical exploits. The Electoral Commission of India has responded that these attacks are theoretical in nature and that reports of irregularities have not been substantiated to a degree that implicates deficiencies in the technology itself. This panel will present two researchers from the effort this spring, a representative from the Electoral Commission of India and an academic advisor to the Electoral Commission of India. Panelists will speak about the current state of Indian voting technology, the critiques made of the EVM, and what the future holds for voting technology in India.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/102301/1/791097528.pdf
The research questions addressed here are: How did the ECI and EVM manufacturers react to allegations made by political parties, VeTA, and voting security researchers that EVMs are vulnerable to manipulation? How was the election practice affected?
In Brazil, the electronic ballot box is made up of two micro-terminals (one. located in the voting cabin and the other with the voting board representative) which are connected by a 5-meter cable. Externally, the micro-terminals have only a numerical keyboard, which does not accept any command executed by the simultaneous pressure of more than one key. In case of power failure, the internal battery provides the energy or it can be connected to an automotive battery. Technical research of 2017 study of Brazil found no systematic difference in vote choices between online and offline electorates.
In FINLAND :
In 24 October 2016 the Finnish government announced it would study the introduction of national online voting. On 21 February 2017 the working group studying Internet voting for Finland launched, with a target date for completion of its work of 30 November 2017. The working group recommended against Internet voting, concluding that the risks outweighed the benefits. In FINLAND electronic voting has never been used in large scale; all voting is conducted by pen and paper and the ballots are always counted by hand. In 2008, the Finnish government wanted to test electronic voting, and organized a pilot electronic vote for the 2008-09 MUN. ELECTION. Internet-enabled DRE machines, supplied by the Private company.
- EVM at some of booth were not working or battery was down.
- At some booth of election, police were blocking the voters with the help of barricade or by force, directing them to go home.
- EVM at some of booth, were opened late without any notice.
- The Presiding Officer tried to get the Polling Agents to sign Form 17(C) in the morning itself, to manipulate the voting counts.
a. It is already made clear that software in the chips can be modified or re-loaded.
b. The only way to guarantee that the VVPAT does not tamper with votes is by tallying the copies of electronic votes before the VVPAT and after the VVPAT—that is, copies of votes in the ballot unit (BU) and the control unit (CU) must be identical.
c.. Incremental, progressive checksums of votes in the BU and CU must have some control number to track the trend of votes stored.
d. Programs can start to behave differently on triggers like specific key presses or date and time. A full, unalterable, retraceable audit trail is the only way to provide undisputable proof of fair play.
e. An Audit trail must be maintained by every EVM. It must include every event from the EVM’s first power-on till the counting of votes to prove the integrity of every vote beyond doubt.
f. Every EVM must include a battery-backed, half-duplex Global Positioning System (GPS) transmitter sharing its location with a satellite at every moment.
Civil society groups, and Supreme advocates mentioned for a 100 percent paper trail to ensure the accuracy of the votes cast and dispel any doubts about the integrity of the electoral process.
If VVPATs are being counted physically or electronically, 100 percent in election process, then, it leaves no room for suspicion or any doubts, as far as the fate of the ballot is concerned.
The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a non-profit working on political reforms, has petitioned the Supreme Court to mandate 100 percent paper verification.
The Election Commission of India, has always opposed the demand of votin by ballot paper, move, citing the time-consuming and waste of manpower to the old paper ballot system.
The Supreme Court of India, has alway turned down the demand of tallying VVPATs with EVM counts or voting by balllot papers, citing the reason can not be possible or supported the ECI's opinion.
The Election Commission claims that two copies of electronic votes are maintained. It is unclear when and where the copies are created. Two issues concern the VVPAT:
1. The VVPAT machine may alter the vote after it is displayed to the voter.
2. The VVPAT machine may show only one copy of the vote to the voter while the second copy, which may or may not be identical to the one shown to the voter, passes to the CU opaquely.
What is the guarantee that the vote is unchanged after it is displayed on the VVPAT? Simply put, how is it guaranteed that the vote entering the VVPAT is the same as the vote leaving it ?
We ought to keep in mind that it is not enough to demonstrate compliance only during testing. The mechanism must provide confirmations for every vote cast in the field. In other words, the passage of every vote must be retraceable on a relevant sub-system of the EVM (BU, VVPAT, and CU) from the moment a button is pressed on the BU to the moment the vote is counted from the CU. Every vote should hold its identity upto the stage of voters, from the stage it is reached to CU and if a vote is randomly selected during testing, it should say, which voter with Voter id or identity id it has took the birth or its creator history.
It is obvious that such a log will highlight discrepancies at every stage. For example, inconsistencies in values of a variable directly reflecting the electronic vote (indicating that the electronic vote was changed), inconsistencies of time, and so on.
If the Election Commission claims that audit trails are included, its response to my Right to Information (RTI) application pointed me to a document that only mentions “event recordings” in passing, certainly giving the impression that only a few events may be recorded and a full audit trail is possibly not maintained. Leaving doubts aside, it is important to note that in none of the hundreds of complaints received and addressed so far has the Election Commission used the audit trail to prove that nothing was wrong with the EVM and the EVM was entirely and completely above board, beyond any suspicion.
Each and every EVM must have a battery-backed GPS transmitter sharing its location every moment with a satellite. The satellite, in turn, must record this data in a cloud storage, ensuring that the geolocation of every EVM is known at every moment. The GPS transmitter will not receive any signal but will only transmit its location to the satellite. A device that only transmits cannot be hacked because it does not receive and recognise any signal or instruction from outside. It therefore cannot be ordered from outside to misbehave.
Hariyana Congress mentions that
- Complaints from 20 constituencies cite 99% battery charge during counting
- Congress's Narnaul, Karnal candidates complained to EC
- BJP came to power in Haryana for record 3rd time
The Congress on Friday submitted more complaints to the Election Commission alleging discrepancies in the electronic voting machines during counting of votes for the Haryana Assembly elections.
The Congress candidates from 20 assembly constituencies, in their written complaints to the Election Commission (EC), have alleged that the batteries in some of the EVMs were charged at 99 per cent during counting.
It is yet to be clarified by the ECEI about more than 20 constituencies cite 99% battery charge during counting, as battery should go down to more extent after whole days of use in voting process. Many doubts were raised for change of EVM machine for exiting one was predicted to be faulty.
As many as 19 lakh EVMs have been found to be missing and the Election Commission has not been able to come clean on their whereabouts. Aside from the clear and present risk to every upcoming election and perhaps even for the elections conducted after the discovery of the loss, it is unacceptable even as a trust issue.
The most deterministic knowledge of every EVM’s whereabouts can be provided by incorporating a “transmit-only” GPS module. And such deterministic real-time data must be available with the Election Commission at all times. Implementing just these two foundational functionalities will answer the following questions that must be answered to establish complete trust in the electronic election system.
According to data collated as of December 4, 2024, by the Maharashtra wing of the Election Commission of India, a record 104 Checking & Verification (C&V) applications have been filed in the state across 95 constituencies requiring the checking of 755 EVMs--a figure that may fluctuate based on overlaps with Election petitions.
The Election Commission has issued a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and announced to provide this facility to the candidates who finish as runner-up and second runner-up in elections. ECEI should order in such cases re-counting of VVPAT slips which should tally with the count at EVM
As per the rules, five per cent of the total number of EVM-VVPAT sets in any constituency are matched randomly. Within this number, candidates can request for investigation by paying an appropriate fee, stating the booth of their specific choice and the serial number of the EVM. ECEI should order in such cases Election by Ballot papers, if contesting candedates insists upon or applied for.
