Congman casts slur on voting machines

Congman casts slur on voting machines
RITU SARIN & ANJALI MODY

NEW DELHI, MARCH 13: Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh's allegation and his demonstration -- on a prototype -- that the electronic voting machine can be rigged was brushed aside on Monday by Chief Election Commissioner M S Gill. However, the controversy is far from over with Singh threatening to go to court and insisting that he complained to the Election Commission which rejected his plea to go back to the traditional ballot box.

``Important Congress candidates, including Amarinder's wife (Parneet Kaur, Patiala Lok Sabha seat, 1999) have won elections in which EVMs were used,'' Chief Election Commissioner M S Gill said on Monday adding, however, that no formal complaint had been made to the EC yet. ``Let Amarinder Singh make a complaint and we will send a team of experts to Punjab to investigate the matter,'' Gill said.

``The EVMs are the demand of democracy. Every political party including the Congress wants to use them,'' Gill told The Indian Express

. ``A candidate cannot blame his losses on a machine and in any case, Amarinder Singh is saying that results on a machine he got manufactured himself can be doctored. Not the machines used by the Election Commission.''

The CEC said that so far 150,000 EVMs have been used and a Rs 150-crore order for 133,000 more had recently been made to two Government undertakings, the Banglore-based Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and the Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL).

Representatives of these two firms -- who are at present trying to meet the deadline for delivering some 70,000-odd EVM's each to the EC -- describe their machines as tamper-proof. ``It's impossible to doctor the results on the EVMs we have manufactured,'' says Commander A P Sharma (Retd.), Additional General Manger of BEL.``The EVMs have a solid micro-controlled design and use an embedded software. If the software has to be tampered with, the hardware of the EVMs being used throughout the country will also have to be changed which is an impossible task.''

Officials of the ECIL said they had already sent the technical details of the in-built safety features of the EVM machines as clarifications to the EC in the wake of the current controversy. Said R P Gupta, the company's senior manager: ``The software of the EVMs has been frozen into the machines and converted into firmware. The custom-built integrated circuits have been developed exclusively for the systems and the chips soldered firmly on the Printed Circuit Boards. Neither the machine nor the software can be tampered with.''

Officials of the two companies revealed that the development of the software was largely done in the EC itself and took years. The EVMs were first used around three years ago and then extensively for the Goa and Harayana elections as well as in 45 constituencies for the 1999 national elections. Before every election, company officials reveal, a demonstration and a mock trail is done for political parties and there has never been a complaint about their security features or efficacy.

Punjab Congress leaders, however, paint a very different picture. A representative who conducted the demonstration on Monday said a ``chip with a bug'' took just ``five minutes, timed with a stop clock'' to insert in place of the original chip in the EC's standard EVM. He said the pre-programmed chip, which operated on the EVM's backup battery could have a timed set-up which activated the bug or could be activate by an FM signal such as one used in electronic car locks.

PPCC officials said that suspicion that voting machines had been tampered with grew as they noticed a pattern in the SAD's huge margins of victory, in by-elections where EVMs were used, which belied their declining popularity on the ground. R R Bhardwaj, of the PPCC said the Vidhan Sabha by-elections in Nawanshehar and Suman in 1999, were turning points. SAD increased its vote share by 129 per cent in Nawanshehar and by a hundred per cent in Suman. At the time the PPCC approached the EC for verification of machines at the EC offices and in the presence of EC officials and engineers, but were ``snubbed''.