 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have with us our editor-in-chief, Rabir Purkaista, who has also been member of various committees of Department of Electronics. And we are going to discuss with him the recent controversy regarding EVMs. So, my first question to you is about the electronic voting machines and the controversy regarding them. How serious are these doubts? You know, let us put it this way, every electronic voting machine in the world is theoretically possible to hack. You can change the program by either software or by replacing the hardware. Indian electronic voting machines are essentially hardware program. It means that whatever the software is has been burnt into the machine itself in terms of chips, E-Proms, whatever we want to call them. So, that if they have to be changed, the programming has to be changed, you have to replace the hardware itself. So, that is one difference between the Indian electronic voting machines which are really in some sense calculators or like calculators, then any other voting machines in the world where they have tended to be either based on operating systems of some kind or they are basically also IP connected. IP connected means they are connected to the internet in some way or the other. Both these having an operating system or having internet connectivity means it is possible to hack them in externally. So, the Indian voting machines in that sense cannot be hacked without actually changing the hardware itself. Now, theoretically again, it is possible to change the hardware. For sure, of course, you can make something which looks exactly the same, have one to one matching of the pins if you have the machine. So, you can design it so that you can change the chips and then there are two things. One is the program itself has changed. So, this is now the hardware is behaving differently than what it was to behave and it is also possible theoretically to add something to it by which from outside you can actually change what is happening inside. These are all theoretically possible. The real issue is, is it possible to do it if we take the voting machine and the procedures and the fact the political parties, the election agents are all involved in the process. So, we do not have to see the electronic voting machine in isolation, but you have to see a part of the overall system in which they are human beings. The only way this is possible according to me is if both the political parties and the election commission work together in order to hack the machines, which means the opposition political parties or at least their agents have to consent in order for such a hacking to succeed. So, many countries still use paper ballots because they have concerns about electronic voting machines. How different is the mechanism of Indian EVMs? Let us put it this way. Electronic voting machines in most countries were based on as I said earlier an operating system and or were connected to the internet directly. Both these are open to hacking in different ways. Let us take for instance what the operating system issue is. We now know that the CIA has back doors or has been able to penetrate all the operating systems including Linux, which we thought were relatively more secure. Wikileaks latest disclosures also show that even the Android operating system or Linux, which is the operating system which is relatively with hot hack proof has also been hacked and CIA is able to access all of them. Therefore, it is possible to subvert whatever protection you build over the operating system and directly change certain things because you have access to the operating system itself. So, that is the core of the machine. The reason that most of the countries in the world went for these systems is that they do not want to invest in trying to build a dedicated system just for elections. Most of them are either smaller, they did not have the infrastructure, they did not want to do it, whatever may be the reason. So, therefore, they use an existing hardware and try to build an EVM around it making it relatively much more insecure because these machines are therefore known, the software is known, at least the operating system there is known and therefore they are much relatively much more easy to hack. The argument about the Indian EVMs have been that though it is much more difficult to hack it in this way, by changing the hardware it is easier to hack because there is no protection at that level, which is correct and I do not disagree with that. Regarding paper trim, of course, paper ballots also can be similarly hacked, you can change the ballot itself that you can rig the stamping of the ballots. So, no system by themselves are foolproof. What you really have is the human beings which have to be taken to consideration with the system put together whether that system can or cannot be hacked. So, the argument why others did not use the Indian kind of EVMs is also because the cost of doing it for them would be much higher. In India, we had the Electronics Corporation of India Limited, ECIL, we had Bharat Electronics Limited, Defense Undertaking, Public Sector, which invested in building this capability and supplying as we said 1.3 million of them and in India the cost of such machines are not very high. So, therefore, it was easier for us to do it. It would not be easy for others to duplicate it because they do not have that infrastructure and the cost for them for doing it any other way would be relatively higher. So, that is one of the issues why they did not go the Indian route and why their machines therefore were relatively less secure. The last point is that if you look at what we have done, it is interesting to see that political parties which have lost, which have included the BGP earlier have complained about some of them have complained about EVMs not being secure. Subramaniam Swami went up to the Supreme Court to say EVMs are not secure and so on. So, now some additional features have been added which will really come into operation in 2019. They are only available only in sample systems at the moment only a sprinkling of them have been put into operation. What is called a VVPAT? There is a voter verification unit which has been added with the EVM by which there you can see whom you have voted. There is a paper that comes out which is behind the glass and that goes into a box into a pouch which is sealed subsequently by the returning officer as well as the other people signing on it. So, that there is in case of a challenge it can be verified with actually the paper ballots. So, can you briefly tell us about the process how EVMs are distributed to different constituency and is it possible in this process that they can be tampered with or they can be had? Well, that's the whole issue that you know suppose I change the program by changing the hardware itself by making it some similar hardware making it look the same when I change it. The question that happens is I do not know which constituency it will go to. So, I also have to therefore, either know the constituency or after having tampered with it ensure that it goes to the constituency I want because in every constituency the 1, 2, 3, 4s do not belong to the same parties depending on the kind of names that they have they could be in different positions. So, because the number is what is hardware program not the party therefore, it's a number which I have to know per constituency. So, election commission calls for a whole bunch of people to be involved with it political parties primarily who are involved in a one first randomization which is to work out which EVM will go where? This is done in front of the political parties and there is a randomization process there is an identification which will go where after which those machines go to those constituencies. So, it is very difficult to decide a priority that this machine will go to this constituency and that machine will go to that constituency. This is the first level of protection that exists then the second part of it is the election the returning the basically the polling agents of the parties who are there they all have signed into it. The second level of a process that takes place where each booth allocation in a constituency is also randomized. So, that means that the connivance at the level of the machine and the polling offices becomes a little more difficult because you do not know which machine will goes to which polling booth. So, that's the second level of randomization that's carried out again the presence of political parties. The third thing is really that if you want to do this that you want to change after the election has been done then you really have to subvert the polling agents of the political parties as well as accounting agents of the political parties because they will check the seals are intact the seals have been broken and so on. So, those are going to be also difficult to do. My last question is how can these evians be improved? How can we improve their mechanism and since the Supreme Court has asked EC to keep a paper trail of evians as well. So, do you think that's necessary? Well, I will say that question finally is what's the credibility of the election process and that's much more important and whether it really can or cannot be hacked. If the people believe there is a possibility of it being hacked by all means a paper trail can be provided and the cost of it is 20,000 per machine. But don't forget this has to be amortized over a number of elections. So, if you take 15 years as a life of a say a VVPAT as it is being has been named which keeps the paper trail then that's on a high cost if it says sees five elections in India the same machine is used for state assembly elections it's used for parliament elections it's also being used for local government elections. So, the number of election cycle that the machine sees is quite high. So, I think that's amortized over an election is adding say 23,000 rupees per election to the cost of keeping a paper trail. As I said given the sanctity of the electoral process which must really be maintained I think not a very high cost to pay. Can it be improved? Yes, it can be improved in terms of making it more easy making the cost lower making the functioning of the machine simpler and so on for the voter. So, the real issue is how can it be made simpler for the voter. There are all kinds of talks about how to introduce biometrics into the system and so on which I believe will only complicate the process and will defeat the purpose of the elections because it will actually make the process of giving the vote more difficult. Some people may not have fingerprints and they will say added scanners I think that's all the way to go. The whatever has been the paper system when the part of it is put under the electronics the rest of the system remains as is I think is relatively more credible as an election system rather than complicated by adding more electronics to the system. So, I think the system can be improved sure but the improvements have to be incremental and should not violate the fundamental way the EVMs have been designed and the electoral process has been designed because without that we lose the credibility of the elections. Thank you so much.