2214 Mon 01 May 2017 LESSON
Online International E- Campaign -Seminar, Symposium and Debate on the following is the need of the hour:
Please join with your views to be published in
Emails:
Also
publish your views in facebook, WhatsApp and Tweet, E-file in Supreme
Courts of all Democracies, UNO, International Human Rights Commission.
Do
not rest till all the fraud EVMs are banned and all governments
selected by these EVMs are dissolved and go for fresh polls with Ballot
Papers.
Do not recognise any leader selected by these fraud EVMs.
See
that the Murderer of democratic institutions (Modi) who is the enemy of
Universal Adult Franchise for tampering, distorting and rigging the
EVMs to win elections is punished with punitive punishment such as the
entire budget of our country to leaders such as Ms Mayawati the leader
of the 99% sarvajan samaj i.e., all societies to enable to distribute
the wealth of the country equally among them.
The
CEC and the presstitute must be equally punished for murdering
democracy in favour
of just 1% intolerant, violent, militant, lunatic, mentally retarded
No.1 terrorist cannibal chitpawan brahmin psychopaths Rakshasa Swayam
Sevaks (RSS) for their stealth, shadowy, discriminatory hindutva cult
and for practicing untouchabilty against Scheduled Caste leader Ms
Mayawati preventing her to acquire the Master Key by tampering the EVMs.
They must be booked under Atrocities Act.
Point
No. 11)
At times RSS admits the truth such as
http://news.webindia123.com/…/
RSS favours paper ballots, EVMs subjected to public scrutiny
RSS Adityanath says that the Evil Voting Machines (EVMs) are for Murderer of democratic institutions (Modi)
Rigging was possible even at the counting stage.
What
made the ballot papers voter-friendly was that all aberrations were
taking place before the public eye and hence open for corrections
whereas the manipulations in the EVMs is entirely in the hands of powers
that be and the political appointees manning the sytem, the paper
commented. The EVM has only one advantage — ’speed’ but that advantage
has been undermined by the staggered polls at times spread over three to four months.
‘’This
has already killed the fun of the election process,’’ the paper noted.
Of the dozen General Elections held in the country, only two were
through the EVMs and instead of rationally addressing the doubts aired
by reputed institutions and experts the Government has resorted to
silence its critics by ‘intimidation and arrests on false charges’, the
paper observed, recalling the arrest of Hyederabad-based technocrat Hari
Prasad by the Mumbai Police.
Prasad’s research has proved that the EVMs were ‘vulnerable to fraud’.
authorities want to send a message that anybody who challenges the EC
runs the risk of persecution and harassment, the RSS observed.
https://vickynanjappa.com/2010/08/27/eci-has-lied-to-people-that-evm-is-fool-proof/
‘ECI has lied to people that EVM is fool proof’
Will Hariprasad go down in history as an EVM thief or has he just set a
precedent which could change the manner in which India votes in the
future? The arrest of Hariprasad who showed on TV how an EVM could be
hacked and also stolen out of a godown did not go down too well with the
Election Commission of India which filed a complaint and had him
arrested.
There has been an uproar over the arrest and several petitions demanding his release have been doing the rounds. G V L N Rao,
President of the Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency &
Accountability in Elections (VeTA) who is also the author of the book,
“Democracy at Risk: Can we trust Electronic Voting Machines,” says that
the action against Hariprasad has opened up the pandoras box. The
Election Commission of India has lied to the people that the EVM is fool
proof and no matter how they try and bully us, we will continue
fighting to prove our point in the interest of the Indian democracy. In
this interview with rediff.com,
Rao says that he has gone umpteen number of times to the Election
Commission of India to debate this issue, but we have always been
denied. Let them chose a platform in public to debate the matter, we are
ready provided they agree.
Your immediate concern must be about Hariprsad and his release. What are you doing about it?
The battle is now a legal one. We have put forth the best legal team
to fight the matter and are exploring all other options to secure his
release. What we understand is that this is nothing but EC sponspored
police raj.
Has this arrest deterred all of you?
No it has not. In fact it has provoked us to prove that the machine
can be tampered with. They have lied to the people and this is what made
us challenge them in the first place. We have not started this fight
only to prove that EVMs can be tampered with. Our fight is to ensure
transparency in the democratic process.
You speak of paper documents when the world is trying to go paperless.
It is needed. This is an election and there has to be a fair process.
We are not against technology. It is a machine after all and can be
tampered with. Paper records are being used in other parts of the world
to ensure that the election process is fair and transparent. Why cant
the same be done in India?
What in your opinion has made the ECI react so sharply?
According to you, you want to bring about transparency then why should
the ECI have a problem?
The ECI has taken upon itself to prove to the world that this machine
is the best thing on earth. Some courts have termed it as a jewel of
India. Why is the ECI making this a prestige issue? It is not a machine
that has been developed by them. The makers of the machine, BEL
themselves have said that it is reliably fool proof. When the
manufacturers themselves have made such a claim why is the ECI acting in
this manner?
Have you made any attempt to meet someone from the ECI and debate the matter?
Several times. We have been denied any opportunity to make our point.
If they are so sure then let them debate with us on a public platform.
Let the media be present during such a debate. The fact is that the ECI
never wanted a dialogue with us. Their claim that the machine is fool
proof is bogus and that is why at every step to defend themselves they
have blocked us.
Some say that the EVMs were rigged during the previous
elections? Isn’t that a bogus claim. Why didn’t the Congress rig it to
attain a majority in Parliament What about Karnataka where they lost.
Also in the case of the recent by-polls even the TRS was proved wrong.
No body is alleging that the elections were rigged. We are just
saying it can be tampered with. It may have been rigged in one or two
places, but no one knows and we don’t want to make any such allegations
either. Since it is a machine and can be tampered with, the system needs
an overhaul. Remember an election can never be fought on trust, it is
always fought on proof.
What do you mean by fought on proof?
Let us face the fact that the ECI knows nothing about the EVMs. There
are so many loop holes in this machine and an awareness regarding this
is already existing. When matters are such, every losing candidate will
have a doubt about the result. As a losing candidate how do I verify the
result? The machine does not give any proof or allow me to detect a
fraud.
Are you making a political point?
Not at all and we are not interested in making any political point.
As I said our claim is not that the elections are rigged. We are saying
in future let there be transparency. Alright, there is technology, but
my point is why should it not evolve? Let us identify the flaws and
rectify it. The ECI must realize that the EVM is a primitive device and
should stop lying to the country that is is state of the art.
Do you think the ECI is on some ego trip?
It looks like. They are unable to accept that someone has finally
proved them wrong. They have invested too much of their faith in this
machine. The ECI has done a commendable job in other areas and let them
take credit for that. Why are they clinging on to this? It is funny, but
they appear to be acting like the vendors of the machine. The
Hariprasad case has only shown their scientific intolerance.
Ethical hacking is one part of the issue and stealing an EVM is a whole other ball game. Do you approve of this?
We have proved how vulnerable the system is. The ECI themselves have
claimed in the past that 80 machines have gone missing. Have they
initiated an inquiry or harassed those people. Here we have shown to
them in the open. They are harassing us. All they are interested in
knowing is who has provided us with the machine. They claim to have
their checks and balances in place. If that is so then why was it so
easy to get a machine out? It has happened in Mumbai, a metropolitan
city. Can you imagine what must be the case in smaller areas? They keep
asking us for the name of the person who handed over the machine to us.
Don’t they know who is in charge of the godown? Let us face it, all EVMs
are insecure and the ECI does not want to accept it.
So, what is the next course of action?
The action by the ECI has increased our resolve to fight. All we were
trying to do is to enter into a dialogue with them and make the
election process fair. But they chose to go ahead and arm twist us. This
is just not done.
India
EVM controversy takes a political turn
TNN | Aug 26, 2010, 02.45 PM IST NEW DELHI: The controversy over Electronic Voting Machines has taken apolitical turn with TDP chief Chandrababu 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.
http://www.indiaresists.com/
BJP’s long fight against EVM: until it started working in favour?
Mayawati, supremo of the Bahujan Samaj Party, has, after her party’s
sub-par seat wins in the recently concluded elections to the UP state
assembly, publicly voiced her suspicion of India’s electronic voting
machines.
So has the Aam Aadmi Party, which was given a decent probability to
notch its first win to a “proper” state assembly in Punjab. They have
been warning about the possibility of EVM-tempering for a few months
now.
With almost no exception, the mainstream news media, has condemned
these suspicions as the habitual rants of sore losers. Even “neutral”
commentators and those seen to be critical of Narendra Modi have made it
a point to question the timing of the suspicions.
“Why now, why not in all these years when other parties were winning
elections through votes counted by the same EVMs?”, it’s being asked,
It’s good to be not let prejudice overcome objectivity. Being
forgotten, however is the is the cold fact that no party has been so
vociferous in its condemnation of India’s voting machines as the BJP.
In the late 2000s, a BJP-sponsored campaign, using local and foreign
experts, custom-built NGOs and ‘think-tanks’ such as the Vivekananda
Foundation. had highlighted the vulnerability of India’s EVMs to
tampering, fraud and manipulation.
Part of the campaign was the book, “ Democracy At Risk! Can We Trust Our Electronic Voting Machines?”, authored
by GVL Narasimha Rao with a foreword by LK Advani, and appreciative
messages by Chandra Babu Naidu and voting systems expert Prof David Dill
of Stanford University
The book is available here for download: http://www.indianevm.com/book_
The book is centred around a research paper by Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp and J. Alex Halderman
Wikipedia lists Rop Gonggrijp as a hacker and founder of XS4ALL, a
Dutch internet services provider that sponsors and hosts the sites of
many free software projects, like Python, Squirrelmail and
Alex Halderman is Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan, specialising in computer privacy and security,
And Hari Prasad? He is founder of NetIndia. a Hyderabad-based “IP
Surveillance & Streaming Systems & Solutions” company .
Hari Prasad was arrested in August 2010 for allegedly stealing an EVM
from the Mumbai Collector’s office..Hari Prasad said that the EVM was
given to him by an anonymous source to test for security
vulnerabilities. It was accepted by one and all, including the EC, that
the EVM he and the other experts took apart was 100% genuine.
Among his vocal and ferocious defenders was Subramanian Swamy.
Hari Prasad’s mug shot is also present on the home page of VeTA,
The home page of VeTA, www.indianevm.com.
describes VeTA as “an independent national level Citizens’ Forum for
promoting Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability in Indian
Elections. The Forum is a civil society initiative involving some of the
best known computer experts, political scientists, public activists,
administrators, academicians, legal professionals etc.”
Hari Prasad is listed on the site as the Technical Coordinator of VeTA.
VeTA is headed by GVL Narasimha Rao, a current BJP spokesperson.
Bottomline: If there is one party in India that has a first hand
understanding of the vulnerability of our EVMs, it is the BJP, because
senior members of the party have been closely involved with the ‘expert’
who managed to steal, according to the EC, an original EVM.
To be fair to the BJP, they took their job of being India’s main
opposition party in Parliament seriously. They went to town with their
findings. Subsequently, the Supreme Court, in 2012, directed the EC to
upgrade the EVMs to include a paper trail.
The Court’s exact words: “From the materials placed by both the
sides, we are satisfied that the “paper trail” is an indispensable
requirement of free and fair elections. The confidence of the voters in
the EVMs can be achieved only with the introduction of the “paper
trail”. EVMs with VVPAT system ensure the accuracy of the voting system.
With an intent to have fullest transparency in the system and to
restore the confidence of the voters, it is necessary to set up EVMs
with VVPAT system because vote is nothing but an act of expression which
has immense importance in democratic system.”
https://indiankanoon.org/doc/
GVL Naramsimha Rao had stated in his book that “the distrust among
political leaders of all hues in voting machines is so high that most
losers are wondering if they had been unfairly defeated in polls. It is
about time India shunned paperless voting to make its election outcomes
verifiable and auditable.”
In LS2104, VVPATs were piloted in 8 of 543 constituencies. No
complaints were reported. In one of them, Mizoram, an independent won
The recently held Punjab assembly elections saw VVPATs used in 33 of
the 117 constituencies. Reports were that 35% paper-trail machines
encounter technical snags
VVPATs were reported to have been used in all of Goa’s assembly constituencies. .No gripes reported there.
It is being hoped that, at the very least, VVPATs will be used in the coming Delhi municipal elections.
Will the VVPATs make our election outcomes more verifiable and
auditable? If one goes by the concerns originally raised by the BJP in
2010, no.
According to Wikipedia,
- The introduction of malicious software into a VVPAT system can cause
it to intentionally misrecord the voter’s selections. This attack could
minimize detection by manipulating only a small percentage of the votes
or for only lesser known races. - Another security concern is that a VVPAT could print while no voter is observing the paper trail, a form of ballot stuffing. Even
if additional votes were discovered through matching to the voters
list, it would be impossible to identify legitimate ballots from
fraudulent ballots. - Alternatively the printer could invalidate the printed record after
the voter leaves and print a new fraudulent ballot. These ballots would
be undetectable as invalidated ballots are quite common during
elections.]Also,
VVPAT systems that are technically able to reverse the paper feed could
be open to manipulated software overwriting or altering the VVPAT after
the voter checks it.
Most important, while VVPAT is designed to serve as a check on DRE
(Direct Recording Electronic) vote recorders, it relies on the same
proprietary programming and electronics to produce the audit trail.
With the EC refusing to move from its old position of getting the
manufacturers ECIL and BEL to self-certify the old EVMs as well the
recently introduced VVPATs, it seems that the only way to get India’s
voting system to be audited and tested is through the courts and public
demonstrations.
Now that the BJP is comfortably in government, it has no incentive to
restart old fights. Its control over a none-secure system, the
vulnerabilities of which it knows too well, gives it a competitive
advantage. The Congress and the other major parties, especially the
regional parties, either do not have the stomach for a fight or have
made peace with whatever crumbs are thrown their way.
That leaves the AAP, the TMC, the communist parties to speak up. If
they don’t, it up to us citizens. Our democratic freedoms, which our
founding fathers fought so hard to win and establish, cannot be held
hostage to any party, ideology, or “constitutional authority”