Posted on 05/28/2004 6:53:14 AM PDT by CarrotAndStick
(NOTE: We are reprinting this editorial by The Hindu, an Indian daily, citing the success of that populous country’s use of electronic voting in the recent elections. It took India more than 20 years to automate election, but its recent exercise -- involving 668 million voters in 800,000 polling stations, with the count over 2 days -- shows it can be done; more so for a country with 43 million voters.)
It is clear that the Election Commission of India’s bold and progressive decision to shift exclusively to the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) across the length and breadth of a huge country has come off splendidly. At every stage after the first field experimentation in 1982, the EVM faced prejudices and inhibitions revolving round the fear that a system of electronic vote registration could not possibly be made tamper-proof. Commendably, those in charge of conducting elections were not put off by the objections but worked with indigenous companies to come up with what is now claimed to be the world’s best electronic voting machine. After a series of tests, reviews, improvements of the product, and, most important of all, persuasion of political parties, EVMs were introduced incrementally in different types of elections. It required courage and confidence in the country’s technological as well as grassroots democratic capabilities to make the big jump in 2004. This has also meant a big financial outlay, meticulous planning, strenuous training, and a mass awareness programme to educate voters, especially the overwhelming majority of them who live in the countryside. It is remarkable that after three major phases of polling, there has been no problem with the EVMs worth speaking about (when the rare technical snag surfaced, technicians lost no time in putting the machine right to the satisfaction of all).
It is worth recalling that in 1977 a far-sighted Election Commission asked the public sector Electronics Corporation of India to design a robust and reliable voting machine to suit Indian conditions. A prototype was developed and demonstrated to various political parties in August 1980. Bharat Electronics, another public sector undertaking, had also developed such a machine and used it successfully for its internal, union elections. Wisely, a common design was evolved and the Commission was ready to test it. Not surprisingly, an Assembly constituency in Kerala was chosen as the guinea pig in 1982 and the experiment led to litigation. The very use of the EVM was challenged because, it was contended, The Representation of the People Act, 1951 provided for voting by ballot but did not envisage the use of any voting machine. The Commission, in consultation with the Government, got the legislative amendments through to validate the new concept. A new provision came into effect from March 15, 1989, followed by amendments to the election rules. After the first big obstacle was negotiated, the challenge was to get the various political parties to accept the idea of secure and simple electronic voting and to build confidence in the ability of the mass of voters to use the EVMs. A systematic exercise was launched to achieve these objectives.
Hearteningly, a million-plus EVMs seem to have made an easy passage to India’s hundreds of thousands of villages. There is a widespread awareness that these machines are highly suited to Indian conditions, even if some developed countries have abandoned them. There is also political recognition that the speeding up of the counting process across a vast and diverse country gives the machine an unbeatable advantage. However, the security and confidentiality of hundreds of millions of votes registered electronically must be expected to emerge as critical long-term issues. Given the stakes, there must be constant vigilance against the possibility of misuse and fraud. There will no doubt be technical improvements (including enhancements of the memory and storage capacities of the EVMs) in the years to come but the real safeguard in any method of voting will be the independence, integrity and non-partisanship of the Election Commission as a constitutionally sanctioned and empowered body.
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TODAY
Don't confuse the results of the election (which I agree with you was towards leftists) with the process of the election (which is what the article was referring to).
whichever govt is in power will always LOVE electronic voting - it can be manipulated with untraceble ease.
That is why the dems are battling so hard AGAINST it right now even though it is a leftist group from arkansas that is pushing it the hardest.
If Bore were prez, we would already have electronic voting, and we would be a communist nation "by popular vote" within 4 years. the same goes for j f'n kerry.
But as long as the repubs are in power the dems don't want it and the right does (for the same damned reason!)
Anything electronic can be manipulated. Period.
If the paper receipts are counted by hand, why bother with an electronic sytsem? If they're not counted by hand, what good are they?
What's needed is a system by which any interested party can confirm a one-to-one correspondence between paper ballots and electronic records, and that the paper ballots and electronic records match.
I have developed a protocol, which I've hinted at before here, by which computers could aid considerably in allowing elections to be tabulated more easily and more verifiably than with paper ballots alone, EVEN IF NONE OF THE SOFTWARE IS TRUSTED. That isn't to say the software doesn't have to work, but rather that it would be impossible for the software to alter the results of the election significantly--whether by accident or design--without there being a very high probability of it being detected.
I'd rather have a closed-source system that implemented my protocol than an open-source system which didn't allow meaningful audits, since in the latter case there would still be the risk of people running software other than the code that was actually approved.
Not really... you can always make a hash of the approved software and check it before and after the voting process.
But how can you make sure that the machine is actually running the software on which you perform the hash?
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