Aadhaar biometric scanners could share the same issues as EVMS in years to come
Ram
Subject: Fw: EVM issue raised in parliament
NEW DELHI: The controversy over Electronic Voting Machines has taken a political turn with TDP chief Chandrabab u Naidu batting for the man who 'proved' that voting machines could be tampered with. The BJP and the Left too join the fray by demanding an all-party meeting to discuss the 'vulnerability' of the EVMs in elections, Times Now reported on Thursday.
According to Times Now, the TDP chief termed as "unfortunate", the arrest of a technocrat Hari Prasad by Maharashtra Police in connection with the theft of an Electronic Voting Machine. He also alleged that Hari Prasad was arrested last Saturday based on a complaint filed by a District Election Officer, which stated that an EVM has been stolen from a government godown.
"The EVMs are tamperable. And, there is no backup. Even experts have raised this issue. Election Commission did not take into consideration all these things, but we don't know why they have arrested the expert. We have raised this issue in Parliament," said Naidu.
"Hari Prasad has only used the machine to prove that it is tamperable. It is not his crime," Naidu said.
Naidu demanded that Prasad be released immediately and all cases against him be withdrawn. He also demanded that the government take steps to ensure that the voting process is made foolproof.
VeTA ( Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability in Elections), the NGO for which Prasad was working as technical coordinator, has termed Prasad's arrest a witch-hunt by the EC even as the opposition parties renewed calls for an all-party meet to discuss electronic voting.
The incident has also caught the attention of the world media, with many experts questioning the EC's reaction to criticism.
Producing a letter written by 12 parties, including CPM, RJD, SP and JD(U) to EC in April on the same issue, Naidu had alleged yesterday that EVMs can be tampered with. He said that the doubts about their functioning have "reduced the people's faith in the system". He demanded that the Election Commission convene an all-party meeting to discuss steps required to reform the voting system.
EVM issue raised in Rajya Sabha
Major opposition parties including the BJP and Left yesterday also demanded an all-party meeting to discuss in depth, the "vulnerability" of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in elections.
"We will urge the government to call an all-party meeting," said Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley in the upper house, adding technical experts should also be called to clear doubts. BJP leader L K Advani has already raised questions about EVMs being tamper-proof. Raising the issue during Zero Hour, M V Mysura Reddy (TDP) said EVMs were vulnerable and did not have backups in case of failure. He alleged that Election Commission was harassing technical experts who had doubts over the functioning of EVMs.
He said cases were slapped against these experts. Reddy was supported by Sitaram Yechury, who said that an all-party meeting should be called to resolve the issue.
V Maitreyan of AIADMK said that EVMs have become the suspects not only for the political class but also for the common man. He said that several European countries have gone back to ballot paper. He also accused the EC of harassing technical experts who questioned the efficacy of the machines.
Chandrababu Naidu demanded that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should intervene in the matter and convene an all-party meeting to discuss this "important issue."
Naidu said all parties, including BJP, have doubts about the functioning of EVMs and hoped that Congress will also join their campaign. "I spoke to ( senior BJP leader) Arun Jaitely and other leaders. We hope Congress will also support us (on this issue)," he said.
'EVMs not tamperproof'
Hari Prasad was part of a three-member global team that sought to prove that EVMs had their flaws. The team needed an EVM for testing, but the Election Commission did not help efforts by failing to provide machines. The team nevertheless managed to procure one, and that is why he was accused of stealing one from Mumbai.
"From the last conversation I had with him, Hari is staying strong. They are putting pressure on him, but he has not revealed the name of the source who supplied it (the EVM)," said Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Michigan and one of the world's foremost specialists on voting machine security.
Halderman had teamed up with Prasad and Dutch hacker Robert Valentijn Gonggrijp earlier this year on the invitation of an NRI association called 'Save Indian Democracy' and VeTA to examine the possibility of misusing electronic voting machines (EVM) in India.
Soon after last year's national elections, the Election Commission had publicly challenged anyone to prove that EVMs could be hacked.
To their dismay, the trio found that the Commission was in no mood to give them one of the 1.3 million EVMs for testing, until an anonymous source supplied them with one.
According to the Maharashtra police who are interrogating Hari Prasad, the machine was stolen from the godown at Old Customs House in Mumbai. Hari was arrested on Saturday, soon after he gave a live demonstration of how EVMs could be pre-programmed to favour one candidate or party.
"This is a case where the police action is obviously politically motivated. It is an attempt to intimidate us," Halderman says.
The controversy was further stoked at an industry conference on EVMs in Washington, US, where Alok Shukla, Deputy Election Commissioner at the ECI and Alex Halderman put forth different accounts regarding the case of Hari Prasad.
Halderman, who said that he and his colleagues had worked with Prasad to demonstrate the vulnerability of EVMs to tampering, pleaded with Shukla to call off efforts by the ECI to have the police question Prasad.
