Many in India still have not come to grips the serious consequences of the status quo that the Election Commis-sion (EC) is maintaining by buying hundreds of thousands of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) that are easily manipulatable. Most constituencies in India are won by thin margins. In current election scenarios where no party has absolute majority, this can have a very drastic effect. Just take this scenario: Let us say without any EVM manipulation (say paper ballots), Party-1 would have secured 175 seats and Party-2 secured 145 seats. Now, how can this election results be manipulated. Let us identify 15 constituencies where seats are known to have been won by thin margins. Now all it takes is to manipulate as small as 5 percent of EVMs (or even much less) in these 15 constituencies to tilt the favor from Party-1 to Party-2. Each party now have 160 seats and neither has majority! So, we changed the whole power scenario by manipulating just a tiny portion of the EVMs in a handful of constituencies.
Does EC not know that these are being manipulated? They have not pursued even one case so far when a Hyderabad company of Hari Prasad was getting so many offers with crores of rupees from political masters begging for a price to fix them from as far as North East in 2009. On the other hand, they jailed Hari Prasad for demonstrating on national TV on how easy to manipulate them.
A paper presented on the easiness of manipulation of the Indian EVMs, was paper Number One in the most prestigious ACM Computer Security Conference in Chicago around 2010! The EVMs were sold as scrap in the constituency of a fellow, who predicted elections accurately, which no country could do! But then our EC does not seem to care.
There is a famous quote by Einstein that “The world is a dangerous place not because of evil people but because of good people who do nothing about it.” It is a matter of shame and of total abdication of Election Commission to continue these EVMs, particularly when everything possible will be tried to manipulate elections. Has EC become another division of political masters?
Our democracy was lined after British and even British have vehemently rejected the machines and continued with paper ballots. All over Europe they are rejected, why would EC want to compromise the country future?
Full Article: Discard Electronic Voting Machines, save Indian democracy.