The India Circuit Blogs

The Indian elections are coming up! In just a few weeks, the first of seven phases of polling will start, kicking off the world’s largest exercise in democracy. The numbers are mind-boggling.  

For example, 900 million Indians are eligible to vote. To give you a sense of how big that number is, the population of the entire United States is around 327 million. In the last general election in 2014, around 540 million Indians (or 66.4% of those eligible) cast their votes. This time round, there are over 1.5 million “new” voters who are 18-19 years of age. There are around one million polling stations. 

As you can imagine, the Election Commission is working day and night right now to ensure that all the millions involved in these elections come together and the elections go off smoothly.

Know your acronyms - EVM and VVPAT

India has used EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) for elections for years now. I had written some time back about EVMs getting a bad rap for being easily tampered with/hacked:

The EVMs are touted to be tamper-proof, though there are studies to show that EVMs used in other nations have had security glitches. The government has always maintained that the EVMs are completely fraud-resistant, but nevertheless for the 2019 general election they are going to be using a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system in addition to the EVMs so that voters can verify that their votes have been cast correctly on the EVM.

Political parties across the spectrum have expressed concern about the safety of EVMs at some time or another.

The other day a popular FM stations that I listen to while I drive to work had the Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka, Sanjiv Kumar, on the morning show and asked him specifically about hacking of EVMs. Not surprisingly, Mr Kumar categorically stated that hacking is not possible. Security protocols and administrative safeguards are in place to ensure this – each device has a chip embedded that can be monitored by the Election Commission, each one is stand-alone (not hooked to a network or even a power source as they are battery operated), the software is “burnt” into the CPU and cannot be tampered with, etc.

However, as this article by the Hindu Center for Politics and Public Policy points out, there is still scope for insider fraud – at the manufacturing phase, while the EVMs are stored between election use, and “at the stage of ‘first level checks’ prior to an election when the EVMs are serviced by authorised technicians from the EVM manufacturers.”

What about the promised paper verification through VVPATs to be used as a check at the time of counting? According to this article, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora has committed that 100% of polling stations will use VVPAT machines along with EVMs. We'll have to wait and see whether this actually happens, since the bulk of VVPAT machines have to be manufactured and there could still be delays in manufacturing, testing, installing, etc.

"Magical" appearances

On a different note - in the last election, PM Modi had made waves by using hologram technology to appear at rallies across the country...often on the same day and even the same time! In this way he "appeared" at rallies in even remote locations where it would have been physically difficult to go in person. It was a coup in that no one had ever used this kind of technology to address such huge gatherings. There hasn't been any news of whether he is using this tactic during this election as well, but considering how well it worked last time it wouldn't be surprising if we saw him in Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala and Manipur - three states that are at opposite ends of the country - at the same time.

On the whole, the next two months are going to be exciting times for India in many ways!