India's election machine under fire
By Santwana Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI - Complaints about the rigging of elections are nothing new in India.
The phenomenon has a checkered life of its own. For instance, it is said that
the Indian side of Kashmir would have had a different history had Farooq
Abdullah and his National Conference not rigged the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir
assembly polls.
Had the so-called pro-Pakistan political formation, the Muslim United Front,
been allowed to win whatever seats it could, it may have been at some cost to
the nationalist party, but hundreds of disenchanted Kashmiri youth would not
have been impelled to seek redress through arms training across the border. The
Kashmir problem might not have had to go through the phase of militancy that
began in 1989 and continues until now at huge
human cost on all sides. And the most hawkish of the separatist leaders, Syed
Ali Shah Geelani, would still be contesting elections instead of boycotting
what he calls "India-sponsored polls".
The second-highest profile allegation came from former prime minister Rajiv
Gandhi. Upset when he failed to defeat the left front in the eastern state of
West Bengal, he coined a rather colorful term, "scientific rigging", to
describe what he felt was the left's methodical approach to ensure electoral
victories for itself - indeed, it has been in power in the state since 1978 and
it is a common insinuation that political popularity alone could not have
guaranteed such blanket success.
This prompted the Election Commission (EC) to order an inquiry of sorts. As an
election observer, civil servant Afzal Amanullah (now principal secretary,
Home, in the state of Bihar and currently in the running for the
vice-chancellor's position at a prominent Indian university) gave a report
detailing what he felt were innovative ways of rigging followed by the left.
For reasons best known to the EC, the Afzal Amanullah report was kept under
wraps for many years. This correspondent brought the findings out in the open
through an exclusive news report published in The Indian Express daily.
But, rigging's been a story mostly of the paper ballot days. There is no dearth
of anecdotes: one has heard of ballot boxes disappearing and then reappearing
with a completely new set of ballot papers; voters turning up at polling booths
only to find that their votes have already been cast; trucks carrying sealed
ballot boxes being hijacked on highways and supplied with a fresh mandate.
All this was routine until the early 1990s, when electoral reforms were
initiated. For this much-needed clean-up, then chief election commissioner, T N
Seshan, overhauled the functioning of the EC by taking out the dusty rule book
from a forgotten shelf.
Ever since the EC started implementing the rules that always existed on paper,
it started winning kudos internationally. Its top officials have been appointed
special observers by the United Nations in tricky elections around the world.
Its technological prowess, the quality of its indelible ink, its skilled
manpower - all this received due appreciation.
The centerpiece of this revolution was the electronic voting machine (EVM) - it
holds a special place in the technology-savvy EC's inventory. As its
application spread progressively across India's political map in a heuristic
experiment that went remarkably well, the country registered a concomitant
qualitative change in the conduct of its elections.
The 2009 parliamentary election was the first one where millions of voters
across the length and breadth of the country cast their votes by pressing
buttons on the EVM. No one doubted the efficacy of the instrument - its arrival
was taken to herald an efficient and error-proof future.
Among the comic moments of the past few election campaigns was when Laloo
Prasad Yadav - a former Railway minister and chief of a regional party in north
India who cultivates a deliberately rustic image - initiated not-so-literate
rural voters into the technique of voting on the EVMs with an exaggerated
"pinggg" sound.
But the EVM's dream run and the EC's perceived infallibility on this front have
been challenged in the recent past. Most recently, by the prima donna of Tamil
politics, J Jayalalitha of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, who
decided to boycott assembly by-elections to five constituencies on the ground
that the EVM - the technological foundation on which rests the claim of fair
elections - is not tamper-proof.
It is often said that the first sign that a political combination or party is
not doing well in an election comes when they leave the campaign trail and take
a delegation to the Election Commission's headquarters in New Delhi -
invariably to complain about the malpractices of the ruling side. But, on a
serious note, the EC does admit that a strong opposition is important for even
the conduct of free and fair elections.
Half the time the EC comes to know about the wrongdoings of a candidate by the
opposing political camp and not from voters or even poll personnel. But this
time, the complaint was not about a candidate or a political party, but the
Election Commission itself. Jayalalitha has alleged that the EC has neither
been able to provide tamper-proof EVMs, nor has it been able to rein in the
ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party (DMK) from indulging in electoral
malpractices.
Citing a live demonstration given by a software engineer named Hari Prasad in
Hyderabad, capital of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, she has
decided to not put up candidates in five assembly segments - Cumbum in Theni
district, Ilayankudi in Sivaganga, Bargur in Krishnagiri, Srivaikuntam in
Tuticorin and Thondamuthur in Coimbatore - where by-elections are scheduled for
August 18.
It is the common understanding that she is whipping up a controversy over the
EVM only to cover up a political decision. She has been on a losing streak for
a few years now. Having been decisively whipped in the recent parliamentary
elections by the DMK, it would be suicidal for her to lose any more ground to
her bete noire M Karunanidhi.
But the grumblings about the EVMs do not stop here. A parallel plot started
with a few people wondering how the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Y S R
Reddy, could predict the exact number of votes his party, the Congress, would
win in an election that everybody else was sure it was losing. This is
snowballing into a crisis of credibility for the Election Commission.
Now, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna
Advani, has joined hands with Jayalalitha to express doubts about the EVM. He
has said the EC should consider reverting to ballot papers in the elections in
Maharashtra, Bihar and other states. The left parties, too, sang in the chorus
- let the EVM be re-evaluated.
It is no coincidence that all of them are parties which have tasted defeat in
the recent past. To give the issue some veneer of authenticity in the public
eye, it needed someone who had no evident vested interest in the process. This
was duly provided by a retired civil servant, former Delhi chief secretary
Omesh Saigal, who stunned the incumbent chief election commissioner Navin
Chawla by demanding an inquiry into the possibility of the rigging of an EVM
through pre-programming.
Saigal and Chawla are from the same cadre of bureaucrats; the former is senior
to him. Chawla naturally could not wriggle out of the situation without taking
some action.
Saigal has claimed that EVMs can be pre-programmed in a manner that every fifth
vote cast in a particular polling booth goes in favor of a certain candidate by
just keying in a code number. In a letter written to the EC, he alleges that it
has never checked the software run on the EVMs. Two public-sector units -
Bharat Electronics Ltd and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd - manufacture
the EVMs.
To strengthen his case, he looked at some international developments: the
Supreme Court of Germany, after a two-year trial, declared e-voting
unconstitutional since the average citizen was found to be ignorant of the
steps involved in the recording and tallying of votes; and Ireland, too, gave
up on e-voting for virtually the same reason.
As for the US, in 2005 its Federal Election Commission came up with a report
detailing its electronic voting system for the public. It took 400 pages of
explanation - but at least voters there have this in the public domain, whereas
no guidelines exist in India. Even so, the situation in the US is complex, with
individual states arriving at their own set of rules for voting - some have
scrupulously kept e-voting out, some have resorted to a dual system.
Asserting that huge gaps existed in the safeguards, Saigal pointed out that the
program code, once written and fused in the OTPROM (one-time programmable
read-only memory), cannot be read back and altered by anyone, including the
manufacturer. Therefore, the EC is merely dependent on the certification
provided by the manufacturer - trust, and no verify.
K J Rao, a former EC official and one of India's best-known independent
election experts, has pooh-poohed the claims made by Saigal. "The randomization
procedure followed by the EC makes it impossible to tamper with the EVMs. No
one knows which batch of EVMs will land where and be used in which election.
How can anyone possibly tamper with a machine? Besides, it is impossible to
introduce a chip inside the system without breaking it."
After being pilloried over its prized possession, the EC finally brought out
its EVMs for a demonstration. Fortunately for the EC, neither Hari Prasad,
Saigal or an independent Hyderabad-based election watch body that joined the
queue of complainants turned up to make their point. That is, demonstrate the
said faults on the machine used by the EC - rather than on their own
look-a-like EVMs.
Santwana Bhattacharya is a New Delhi-based journalist who writes on
politics, parliament and elections. She is currently working on a book on
electoral reforms and the emergence of regional parties in India.
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