Explained | India’s new proposal for migrant voting

Why is there opposition against the new Remote Electronic Voting Machine (RVM)?Are there doubts regarding the existing EVMs? What are VVPATs and why were they introduced inside the voting units? Will the new voting machines be different? What will be the administrative and logistical challenges?

The story so far: The Election Commission of India (ECI) could not demonstrate a prototype of its new Remote Electronic Voting Machine (RVM), which would allow domestic migrants to vote in national and regional elections, after the Opposition raised concerns about the logistical and administrative challenges to remote voting. The Congress had earlier urged the poll body to first “restore trust in the electoral system” and systematically address fears of the misuse of existing EVMs.

EVMs started being used on a larger scale in 1992 and since 2000, have been used in all Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections. There have been three iterations of the machine with improved features, the latest one being the M3 model which was manufactured from 2013 onwards. Multiple political parties in 2010 approached the ECI to come up with a mechanism that could help verify that the EVM had recorded the vote correctly as intended by the voter. The ECI, thus, developed along with two Public Sector Undertakings (PSU), the Voter Verified Paper Trail Audit (VVPAT) machine to have a paper trail in the voting process. The use of VVPATs has become universal in elections since mid-2017.

The current EVM setup has a Balloting Unit (BU) which is connected to the VVPAT printer, both of which are inside the voting compartment. The VVPAT is connected to the Control Unit (CU), which sits with the Presiding Officer (PO) and totals the number of votes cast, on its display board. Only once the PO presses the ballot button on the CU, does the BU get enabled for the voter to cast her vote by pressing the key corresponding to the candidate on the ballot paper sheet pasted on the BU. The VVPAT, which is essentially a printing machine, prints a slip with the poll symbol and candidate name, once the voter presses the key on the BU. This slip is visible to the voter on the VVPAT’s glass screen for seven seconds after which it gets dropped off in a box inside the VVPAT. Once a vote is cast, the BU becomes inactive till the PO schedules the next vote by enabling it again from the CU.

Concerned civil society organisations, civil servants who have overseen elections, academicians, journalists, former judges, and political figures formed the Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE) in 2020, which conducted analysis, recorded depositions from national and international field experts and released a report in 2021 titled, ‘Is the Indian EVM and VVPAT System Fit for Democratic Elections?’.

The report highlighted the widely recognised ‘democracy principles’ to be adhered to while conducting public elections. It stated that the election process should not only be free and fair but “also be seen to be free and fair”, meaning instead of being told to trust the process the general public should be provided with provable guarantees to facilitate this trust. The report points out that the details of the EVM design, prototype, software, and hardware verification are not publicly available for technical and independent review, rendering it available only for a black-box analysis, where information about its inner workings is not accessible.

However, the ECI says that unlike other countries, Indian EVMs are standalone, are not connected to the internet, and have a one-time programmable chip, making tampering through the hardware port or through a Wi-Fi connection impossible. Multiple computer scientists have demonstrated that this claim does not stand up to scrutiny as it does not take into account ‘side-channel’, insider fraud, and trojan attacks. Besides, the OTP chip which cannot be rewritten, also has a flip side, even pointed out by BJP leader G. V. L. Narasimha Rao in his 2010 book Democracy at Risk! Can we trust our Electronic Voting Machines?. The ECI sends the EVM software to two foreign chipmakers (in the U.S. and Japan) to burn into the CPU and the manufactured chips are then sent to India for assembly into machines by the two PSUs (BEL and ECIL). This means that the manufacturers cannot read back the contents of the software to ensure its integrity is intact. Functionality tests done by manufacturers can only reveal if the machine is working properly.

Dr. Subhashis Banerjee, the head of IIT-Delhi’s computer science department and a member of the CCE, told The Hindu that for the voting process to be verifiable and correct, it should be machine-independent, or software and hardware independent, meaning, the establishment of its veracity should not depend solely on the assumption that the EVM is correct. Ronald Rivest, an MIT professor and the inventor of encryption, defined in his seminal 2008 paper that “a voting system is software (hardware) independent if an undetected change in software (hardware) cannot lead to an undetectable change in the election outcome,” or even if the voting machine is tampered, the same should be detectable in an audit. Dr. Banerjee explained that a simple way to keep the process software or hardware independent is to keep another record, which in a crude or weak way, he said, is done by the VVPAT, which, he added, has its own set of problems.