 Hello and welcome to NewsClick, we are going to discuss with Bappa Sinha who has been an expert shall we say on embedded systems software and has looked at the EVM question quite closely. In the light of the claims made yesterday by Mr. Shrija in a press conference in London in front of the former minister incidentally also the science and technology minister and later on the HRD minister in the earlier UPR regime Mr. Kapil Simbal. Bappa this has now become a high profile shall we say expose of the EVM with cameras, with television stations all across the country. Some of them even giving life coverage to the event I think the quaint was doing a life coverage of the event and today we have the again the minister of information technology Mr. Prasad reacting to it. So, it has become a very high level circus shall we say before we go into the circus itself, the media circus around this. Let us talk about what was the story that was presented by Mr. Shrija. How do you characterize this because there are technological claims, the claims about what happened and the claims even about the position of his heart in the body. So, how do you look at all of this? I think it went from at least from the pre-announcement it which was supposed to be a serious event but it degenerated very quickly into a B-grade Hollywood movie script and formed there to a comedy spoof. That is the only way to describe it. It was watching it was a surreal experience I don't think there is any word to describe it. So, I had switched on to the channel Quince channel expecting there would be EVM some things would be done to it and then we could clarify our doubts on the authenticity of the EVM or something but so the there was no EVM the guy showed up the guy didn't show up he he was on a Skype call from the from some location in the United States not Mr. Shrija. Mr. Shrija was on Skype he was not in London oh he was not in London no he was not he was he was he was in some location on Skype and his eyes and most of his face were blacked out in a dark room it looked like a spy thriller kind of thing and he claimed that he couldn't come to London because he had been attacked that that the government had found out that he was going to do this expose and somebody had disclosed his location and he there was somebody tried to kill him and he escaped and so that's why he couldn't travel and his story was that the EVMs couldn't come because the people who were supposed to carry the EVMs they got co-opted by the government and so they they sold out so that was his story so basically he had nothing to show and then he came up with this fantastic story that he was part of ECIL ECIL is the PSE which manufactures EVM for one of the two PSE one of the two PSE manufactures EVMs for the election commission so apparently he used to work in ECIL in Hyderabad and in 2013 I think that's what he said in 2013 somebody approached him under the directions of Gopinath Munday he named BGP leader Gopinath Munday and they said that this team should hack EVMs with the purpose of discovering loopholes in the EVMs so that they can do better EVMs so their team apparently had the successfully hacked the EVM and disclosed that information to their whoever had given them the assignment and with the expectation that the EVMs would better EVMs were created and then he claims that no better EVMs were created and instead these hacks were utilized to massively rig the 2014 election using well we'll get to the technology later but before that he said that then on 12th of May their entire team was called to some office in Hyderabad where everybody was shot and everybody the BGP some BGP leader ordered somebody to shoot at everybody all his team members died he somehow survived because the bullet went through his chest out of his body but because his heart was inverted heart it was not on the left but on the right apparently there is some heart condition where your heart could be flipped right so and so even though the bullet went through his chest it missed the heart but he went unconscious and then somehow got up and started running like out of a spy thriller it's not like a high quality spy thriller it's out of a Rajnikan movie Rajnikan James Bond I think is a scale of the production rather than the storyline but coming to what you said apart from shall we say the complete implausibility of the scale of events of a team being shot him escaping being able to escape with all this knowledge leaving all of this out let's look at the technical claims made that somehow it is possible using low frequency radio waves to apparently rig the election in somebody's favor or the other is that the claim technical claim being made the story makes no sense right but his story is that these EVMs even though they were designed long back for some reason they had radio transmitters and receivers why would somebody making EVMs in 1980s under a congress rule put the radio transmitters and receivers and congress would be unaware of this till 2014 is is left unexplained but apparently they had radio transmitters and receivers and these transmitters and receivers were transmitting radio signals at very low frequencies right at 7 to 300 hertz that 390 hertz that's what you mentioned so you have to understand that most of our communication right when you use a cell phone by 5 these are in gigahertz range so that's where convention radius to yeah right yeah so but our modern communication is mostly in gigahertz range and and and the and these very low frequency ranges it's difficult to use them primarily because look the frequency like is a inversely proportional to the wavelength right so so the less smaller the frequency the larger higher the wavelength and therefore if you want to find the frequency the information from the frequency therefore you need a longer essentially antenna right so your cell phone because this is a small device has to have antenna which is very small and hence the the frequency has to be very large for your cell phone to be reliably getting that signal now look at at if you do some like just Wikipedia search at 7 hertz the the the antenna required would very well be the size of India right at 400 hertz right he's a 390 but let's at 400 hertz it would be a few kilometers that's the size of the antenna right there's an interesting like I was doing a search google search yesterday there's an interesting project which happened in Wisconsin in the mid 80s they build a they build a radio transmission system at 70 to 80 hertz and there the antennas spanned almost the entire state of Wisconsin so so they had antennas at two locations across the state of Wisconsin covered by a connected by a wire and that's how they could do this so now to assume that this would somehow be miniaturized and put inside a chip it simply means that violating the laws of physics apart from the technology implausibility it's simply a violation of the laws of physics and we are not surprised by somebody sitting in a dark room making an astounding claim that happens all the time what is really astounding is that we had a congress minister in the in that place sort of organizing the press conference if not organizing giving it credibility even I believe two or three days before the event to be there and then of course this big picked up by all the channels shall we say without due diligence right congress is now backtracked right I mean this has been such an embarrassment that they're backtracked and they said that couples are well when they're on his in his own capacity nothing to do with congress but look I mean we all knew the congress that that this was had the tacit approval of congress in some way a lot of media both digital media and tv channels some tv channels were there so it's just astonishing right look I mean if you compare it with it's not like that they haven't been whistleblowers before who made stunning claims right I mean just like in the past decade you had Assange and Snowden make really claims which were mind-blowing right I mean Snowden we walked out of that NSA facility and gives you this documentation but he doesn't come like the first thing he doesn't do is do a press conference he first gives you reams of documentation and you read that and and you're stunned and then you interview him right you don't get a random character sitting in a dark room without any evidence and give him the this kind of exposure and credibility this is it's something about our Indian psyche or like lack of scientific temper there's something to do with that you know it's also I think it's also interesting the press relied that a due diligence would have been made by Mr. Simpel and whatever the congress say therefore the belief at least on the media I think was that if Mr. Simpel is going to get a credibility after all don't forget it's not only a lawyer he was also as I said the science and technology minister okay irrespective of his science and technology shall be say understanding so for him to give it that credibility by being there the only parallel I can it reminds me of is Mr. Gulzarila Nanda when he was the acting prime minister for a very brief while he had allowed a hatha yogi to have an experiment in which he would walk across water he had the ability he claimed to walk across water so Mr. Nanda was there as acting prime minister therefore the de facto prime minister the usual prime minister if you will at that point and the entire media was there to see hatha yogi perform this miracle unfortunately for both Mr. Nanda and Gulzarila and the hatha yogi he went right through now Mr. Simpel seems to have done exactly something very similar fortunately he's no longer the science and technology minister though the current science and technology minister Harsh Vandana has not acquitted himself any better in his seat of ministerial seats so to say by what he's been talking about in the science congress what Mr. Modi has talked about the science congress but this is quite quite amazing but leaving that out to the time it is like it is as a BJP and congress are in this competition of who is the dumbest right what is this dumb and dumbest film you know leaving this aside there have also been serious questioning of the EVM and we have I think discussed earlier that technologically we can never say a piece of technology designed or built by any organization it's hack proof meaning that if you take the EVM we know it's like a calculator chip it has shall we say burnt in itself the program so if the program is not something which can be reprogrammed or changed by an extra combination of ski strokes from an external device it's really burnt into the chip it is possible that you can hack this machine if you change the chip for example this has been what the app demonstration was about look any machine is hackable so is hackable what does it mean to hack a machine it means that if it's a if it's a computer like machine then then it has hardware and a software so either you modify the software or you modify the hardware now even if it's a not a digital machine let's say you have a doll with a bobby head now if you open the doll up and remove the spring under the head and then it stops bobbling now so you have hacked the doll right so any machine can be hacked so that is not been contested the question is given the EC's administrative procedures given the scale at which Indian elections happen right so I think like let's say a state like Bengal I think has about 75,000 or 77,000 polling booths that means that 77,000 EVMs are deployed only in the state of Bengal right and and so in like across the country if you have the 2014 elections been hacked we are roughly looking I think I don't know the exact numbers but somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2 million EVMs which are deployed to conduct the elections so in order to hack it at that large I think the number is about 3.2 some lakhs that means 320,000 no much large much larger because because UP it's a look UP has 400 constituencies right and typically every constant assembly is about 80 yeah but it doesn't matter so every assembly constituency has roughly 250 booths so if you multiply 200 sorry 400 constituencies times 250 booths that itself is I think close to close to 100,000 yeah that that itself is close to one so so one state itself is very close to Bengal I know is about 77,000 Rajasthan is about 51,000 okay so if you add the entire India they were really looking about 2 million 1.5 to 2 million that that's the and in that if you have to be able to hack a substantial number or at least let's say 10 percent of the EVMs to be able to change the result at a national level or even at a state level so you are looking at hacking hundreds of thousands of EVMs bypassing EC procedures I mean unless you do it at a central location if you have to do it distributed fashion then you have to employ an army of people who would know about this operation so your basically it would mean that you have to hack them at the ECIL or at the BL level where the EVMs are manufactured so if you say the argument it could be that we are they are actually changing something over there which therefore leads to 10 percent of the machines being hacked so they have to know which 10 percent and then take some steps accordingly look that in the 2004-14 elections the the EVMs were manufactured in Congress regime so did such a large-scale operation happen without Congress knowing it's it's very unlikely also the the EV there is also the checks and balance of how the distribution of the EVMs takes place in which the other political part is also part right but but even before that they have to realize that the EVMs at least that's what the EC claims the EVMs have do have a software in them but the software resides on what is called read-only memory so yeah so so it can it can only be written once during the manufacturing process and it cannot be rewritten so this is not like a your conventional computer computer where you are in a hard disk you can go and modify stuff right here you can't so when you reboot when you boot the EVM the code it comes up with has only been written in the manufacturing process so unless you are saying that the manufacturing the the people who wrote the code burned it into the they are compromise there is like assumption suppose worst case scenario this 12 people in the ECIL had actually told them how to compromise the code assuming those you know who are shot with the heart and other side assuming that that kind of story it still means that because the numbering system is such there is an alphabetical order that alphabetical order is essentially not the parties but the name of the candidates since we do not know at the manufacturing state which candidate will be on which location in the button therefore it means also being able to control where these machines will go to which booth to the appropriate booth so to say so that it will match the change program well before that because these have the code is contained in read only chips you have to replace that read only chip assuming that I am going to the next step on assuming that they have replaced it's not that easy right like so you are talking about replacing chips in hundred thousand EVMs stored not in one location but spread across the country and nobody coming to know during a congress rule this is all happening during congress rule let's even make that assumption I'm going to the next step even after that assumption that this can be done the next issue is that the political parties representatives actually are part of the distribution of the EVM mechanism right which is supposed to be randomized at two levels which go to which states within the state again randomized which goes to which booth yeah well so so there is a very fairly elaborate procedure right it's starts with EVMs go to the state right there there is a first level check the first level check all political parties are invited representatives of political parties are invited representatives come from the PSUs who have manufactured the EVMs they open up the EVMs they do a thorough testing checking of the parts to make sure that nothing has been replaced in presence of the representatives of political parties mock polls are conducted at that point once the mock polls are conducted the the control units get sealed so if you were to get into the control unit after that the seal presumably broken beyond that this is the first level check then there is a randomization process which decides which EVM goes to which no which EVM goes to which assembly assembly constituency now this is important because it is at the assembly or the parliamentary constituency level that the order of who of which party is first and which party is second the order in the ballot unit that gets decided only at the at the constituency level EVM doesn't know the candidate it only knows one two three four kind of it knows the order in the ballot unit and the the order in the ballot unit is decided on the basis of your name so it's alphabetically the names of the candidates are listed first the national party is in the state party is then the rest and then the order is decided so so if you want if you want to give preference by hacking you want to give preference to one slot in the ballot unit then you'll have to know which which constituency that unit is assigned to you can't do it before that because the order will change and you also have to know what will be the other candidates there so that you will know the slot the button number yeah you will have to know your number but you will have to know you can only know your number when you know the other candidates of the political party so so that gets so like I said that gets decided later and so while the this this thing is done through a computer program so again the computer program was written in congress's time so so so so unless bgp was like taking over the entire government machinery without congress knowing these things will be highly unlikely now what you're talking of really now today we're not talking the 2014 election assuming that wasn't like this is there a question of evm being hacked today is really what we're discussing the 2019 poll look if all processes that like ecil and bel i think that's the other yeah if their entire top leadership has been compromised and um and at different levels engineering groups have been come because this is not like top leadership right like the engineers of court there are engineers who assemble who test so everybody has to be under everybody is compromised this can't happen so bapa you're still harping only on that issue i'm saying what is the responsibility of the political parties that they also have a role to see that supposing anything happens say supposing then what is their role also you have to see so that if such a process such compromise takes place assumption wild as it may be they still would be able to catch it because they are also a part of the shall we say the mock poll the randomization process and all of these that even if it is compromised these would hold good and this is then still fail because it may apparent there is a problem yeah so so so they are part of the uh the the first level check where mock polls are conducted in front of them uh seals are done in front of them they are part of the first level randomization which assigns things to cons uh evm show constituencies they are part of the second level randomization which assigns from the constituencies to which booth they are after that the ballot setting is done during the ballot setting another mock poll is done they are part of that beyond that on the polling day before the election start another mock poll is done and they are part of that also the from the time the evm's get assigned to assembly constituencies and then to booths the candidates are notified that which booth has with serial number so let's say evm was swapped the candidate should be telling their their polling agents that look you need to go and check if the if the serial number matches and the the polling agent is within his right his or her right to ask for the serial number of the of the evm on the day of polling once polling is complete the polling officer is supposed to close the evm and seal it in presence of polling agents and the polling agents can sign on the seal so all polling agents can sign on the seal on the day of the counting the counting agent can again ask again ask for the serial numbers to be matched so this is all within his rights right that he can verify the seals um after the counting is over um uh candidate or a counting agent can challenge the result um the challenge gets recorded right so it's up to the discretion of the EC to whether the challenge is honored or not but the challenge is recorded right it goes on record so that you later file a court case you will have the record that you challenge it an EC overruled the challenge um and there is also the VVPAT unit now which has a certain number of words that you can tally it to see as a cross check that the the the voting has not been covered so so so the VVPAT check can be requested at two stages so if if you have a voter who goes and presses a button and the what comes out in the VVPAT is different from the button he he or she pressed the the voter can can raise a challenge to the to the polling officer and then the polling officer is required to verify that the the system is working properly um and on the counting day after the counting is over a candidate can challenge a result of of any uh EDM and then the EC is at least required to register the complaint whether the EC then goes ahead and does a tally with the VVPAT that's up to the discretion of the EC but the there has to be a record of that right now um the thing is that this is a fairly elaborate process with lots of checks and balances and at least multiple points where where candidates can challenge now if you are going to now claim that large-scale rigging was done in the UP election let's say because after the general election the other most controversial for for the EVM conspiracy theorist is the UP election because nobody expected BJP to have been in such a then where were the challenges right I mean you should you after the election result has been declared you can go to court for stipulated within a stipulated period of time and challenge the result so how come nobody went to court how come there is no record of candidates challenging the results of the EVMs so these are basic legal procedures which I mean I'm sure at least the large political parties they have the ability to employ lawyers who can advise them on these and none of this was done instead what we have is this thing of hair say that that EVMs were hacked you cannot make the claim based on hair say I mean you have to produce some credible evidence to go by when like without any credible evidence how do you make such claims but beyond that what I was I think our viewers have to know is that it is also the responsibility of the political parties to satisfy themselves that the voting has been fair and the EVMs have been reviewed by them how it has functioned and they have to be educated enough to satisfy themselves of this it is not the responsibility of the fairness of the elections rest only on the election commission but also rests and all the political parties and on us as concerned and you know shall we say voters who should understand what the electoral process is yeah it's everybody's responsibility but more that this is on top of that what I would want to add especially from yesterday's conference and and apparent congress involvement and the reaction on social media is it's also a responsibility to have a some semblance of scientific temper right you can't live in your alternate reality you have to interact with other people and so when you're interacting with other people it has to be the discourse has to be based on some reason some logic and some facts it cannot be Kanisha's head was a case of what is it cosmetic surgery I mean even if I take it as organ transplant not cosmetic surgery or that the EVM was hacked in this particular way both are nonsensical claims one pure stupidity one a combination of stupidity with ideology shall we say but thank you very much Mapa for being with us trying to help us and our viewers of what this EVM controversy is and what is the role of us as electors people who cast vote as voters and also of political parties apart from what election commission does do also for the media to be little more informed about the core democratic process in the country and not get into their hobby horses or their conspiracy theories at least without any quote unquote as Mapa called it scientific exercise of scientific temper what I will call exercise of some minimum common sense one thing I'd like to add is that we can support this demand that more bvpats are automatically counted after the evm counting is done so currently by default one bvpat is randomly select one evm is randomly selected and its bvpat paper trails are matched with the evm count and I think it would be it's a fair demand to say that instead of just one in a constituency so your assembly constituency roughly having 250 seats just counting one let's say if you count 10 percent of the evm's and match that the evm count with the bvpat count that would be a fair demand and it would add transparency to the to the process and it will also alleviate a lot of people's discomfort with with technology and with evm's in general it's more as much to satisfy people's technological disquiet rather than actually the process of the election itself thank you very much Mapa for being with us this all the time we have a news click today do keep watching news click and we will come back with you for more issues like this debunking myths modern myths as well as ancient ones