EVMs have recently been the subject of controversies ranging from “hacking” to “missing votes2”

Since Narendra Modi took office as India’s prime minister in 2014, the opposition has repeatedly demanded that electronic voting machines (EVMs) be phased out in favor of paper ballots for voting. The Opposition has claimed and backed a variety of charges against EVMs, including hacking of EVMs and other forms of manipulation.

These demands have often been made after the elections that Modi’s BJP won. After the BJP won the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, Mayawati, the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), was one of the first to raise concerns about the EVMs. Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader and chief minister of West Bengal, most recently claimed that the BJP is hacking EVMs in preparation for the national elections in 2024.

when the Left backed the BJP’s questioning of the EVMs

Ironically, the CPI-M backed the BJP’s stance when it initially questioned the reliability of the EVMs in 2009.

The BJP’s highest leader at the time, Lal Krishna Advani, questioned the EVMs in 2009. However, unlike the Opposition during the last several years, he did not contest the results of the 2009 Lok Sabha election or accuse the government of overt misconduct.

In 2009, Advani told The Indian Express, “We should go back to paper ballots unless the Election Commission can guarantee that Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are foolproof and every potential for their malfunctioning is taken care of.”

Advani, however, concentrated on the potential “malfunctioning” of EVMS rather than any overt fraud.

“Advani stressed that no one was raising any questions like rigging or malpractices in the elections, but larger questions about the possibility of EVMs malfunctioning must be addressed,” said The Express at the time.

According to PTI at the time, Advani garnered backing from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), and Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S).

Questions about the EVMs had been raised after remarks made by Omesh Saigal, a former chief secretary of Delhi, that it was quite likely that the EVMs could be rigged.

 

EVM charges from the opposition after the 2014 elections

The Opposition continually ran a campaign against EVMs in the wake of the 2014 general elections because to allegations of hacking and manipulation. Numerous assertions have been shown to be untrue, and these charges continue to be unsupported.

Here is a compilation of the times opposition leaders have questioned electronic voting machines throughout the years:

 

UP Assembly Elections in 2017

Former UP CM and BSP leader Mayawati questioned the EVMs after the BJP swept to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2017.

 

Mayawati said that because the BJP received votes in places with a plurality of Muslims, there must be a problem with the EVMs. The BSP has relied heavily on the votes of Dalits and Muslims.

 

“The outcomes of the state [UP] and Uttarakhand elections are highly unexpected. Nobody is able to consume them.The findings plainly indicate that either the voting machines only accepted votes for the BJP or that votes for other parties were also moved to the BJP. According to information that the party and I have received, the BJP has gotten the plurality of votes, including in places with a high concentration of Muslims. This strengthens the notion that the voting machines have unquestionably been manipulated, Mayawati stated at the time in Hindi.

Aam Aadmi Party and the 2017 election

Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), attributed EVM failures to electoral defeats in the assembly elections in Punjab and Goa as well as the Delhi municipal elections.

 

In the Delhi assembly that year, AAP MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj also ‘demonstrated’ the ‘tampering’ of EVMs. However, as all EVMs are kept by the Election Commission of India (ECI), the machine used was not an EVM. AAP stated in its “demonstration” that by swapping out the motherboard and adding a “secret code,” the system could be modified in less than 90 seconds. The ECI disregarded the accusations.

 

“Allow us entry to the facility that houses the EVMs used in the Gujarat elections. To replace all motherboards and hack the devices, we just need three hours. Bharadwaj was cited at the time by The Times of India as stating, “I challenge that once the secret code is introduced, you (BJP) will not win a single booth in the state.”

 

2019: The press conference in London

At a press conference in London in 2019, the craziest accusations were made. Kapil Sibal attended the occasion.

 

Syed Shuja, a self-described cyber-expert, said at the press conference that the BJP “hacked” the 2014 general election and that some of his comrades were slain in a Hyderabad guesthouse. He further said that BJP leader Gopinath Munde, who perished in a vehicle accident in June 2014, was slain because he knew the truth. Independent fact-checks refuted the assertions.

 

According to Newslaundry, Shuja’s claim that a guesthouse existed nearby in Hyderabad is untrue, as are his claims about his employment history. Shuja also said that the 2014 Kishanbagh riots, which also resulted in the burning of his family’s home and the deaths of his parents, were a cover for these murders. According to Newslaundry, there is absolutely no documentation of the parents’ passing during the one-day violence.

 

Reliance Jio, according to Shuja, was instrumental in the BJP’s victory in the 2014 general elections. But at that time, Jio had not even been created.

 

According to white hat hacker and IT specialist Ajit Hatti, Shuja’s allegations of “hacking” were “absurd,” and claimed to have been created through a “military-grade frequency modulator.”

 

Since EVMs lack wireless connections, there is nothing you can accomplish without physically touching the EVM. In the lack of wireless connections or via interference, there is no known mechanism to tamper with data using any kind of transponder. Electromagnetic impulse may be used to stop an electrical equipment, but vote tallies cannot be manipulated to favor any party, according to Hatti.

 

In response to Shuja’s assertion that his team’s interception of pro-BJP transmissions prevented EVM hacking in the 2015 Delhi elections, Hatti told Newslaundry, “The person is talking about hacking EVMs through a wireless interface which doesn’t exist, through a technique which is unheard of and unverified, and by exploiting an unknown vulnerability which is even remotely and hypothetically not possible.

 

“Even if an attack on all of the EVMs across the country is feasible and can be carried out by an established telecom Jio, then to intercept those attacks, you need access to similar telecom-like infrastructure,” he added.

 

Discrepancy between votes cast and votes counted?

According to a study, there was an error in the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) reported figures for the 2019 general elections because votes cast and votes counted did not agree in several seats.

 

“Of the 373 seats that were polled in the first four stages, more than 220 had vote surpluses recorded; the remaining 220 had vote deficits…The EC officer on duty should promptly flag any vote mismatches to his superiors, advises an EVM specialist, and there shouldn’t be even one, according to The Quint on May 31, 2019.

 

Similar inconsistencies were also noted in the 2018 Madhya Pradesh assembly elections, according to a separate article by The Quint. Regarding the 2019 general election and the 2018 MP elections, Outlook is unable to independently validate this story.

 

The Quint previously covered a similar disparity in the November 2018 Madhya Pradesh Assembly Elections. The statistics on the number of votes cast and the number of votes tallied did not match in 204 of the 230 Assembly seats, according to the study.

According to The Quint, the ECI did not respond or provide an explanation for the disparities.

The Supreme Court is now considering a petition22 that the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) submitted over a similar issue. According to a story in The Leaflet on July 18, the petition signaled a discrepancy between votes cast and votes confirmed using voter-verifiable paper audit trails (VVPATs) during the 2019 general elections.

Furthermore, according to the article, the SC has ordered the ECI to reply to the ADR’s petition.

The petition claims that there is a total legal void and that the ECI failed to provide a process for confirming that a voter’s vote has been recorded as cast, which is a crucial component of voter verifiability.Accordingly, the petitioner asks the Supreme Court to order the ECI to make sure that voters may use VVPATs to confirm that their vote has been recorded and tallied, according to The Leaflet