Former Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Sunday schooled X owner Elon Musk on the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and its possibility of getting hacked. This came in as a response to Musk issuing a statement to eliminate electronic voting machines. He said that the risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high. Chandrasekhar in response said that this was a huge sweeping generalisation statement that implied no one can build secure digital hardware.
The former Union Minister tweeted, "Elon Musk's view may apply to the US and other places, where they use regular compute platforms to build Internet-connected Voting machines. But Indian EVMs are custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media - No connectivity, no Bluetooth, wifi, Internet. ie there is no way in. Factory-programmed controllers that cannot be reprogrammed. Electronic voting machines can be architected and built right as India has done. We would be happy to run a tutorial Elon."
Musk did not accept defeat and said, "Anything can be hacked."
Chandrasekhar replied by saying, "Technically ur right - anything is possible E.g. with quantum compute, I can decrypt any level of encryption, with lab-level tech and plenty of resources, I can hack any digital hardware/system including flight controls of a glass cockpit of a jet etc. But that's a different type of conversation from EVMs being secure and reliable vis-a-vis paper voting. And we can agree to disagree."
Opposition's Reaction
The national president of Indian Youth Congress, Srinivas has a suggestion for Musk. He tweeted, "Dear Elon, Kindly refrain from challenging the Modi government or the ECI, 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 "𝗫" 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝘃𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮 :) Thank you for your understanding."
Rahul Gandhi did not lag behind either. While replying to Musk's first tweet, Gandhi wrote, "EVMs in India are a "black box," and nobody is allowed to scrutinise them. Serious concerns are being raised about transparency in our electoral process. Democracy ends up becoming a sham and prone to fraud when institutions lack accountability."
Can EVMs Be Hacked?
The controversy of EVMs being hacked during polls to favour a particular party has been going on for a long time now. Different party members have different views of this, however, there have been confirmations that EVMs can be manipulated.
One of India’s foremost electronic voting machine (EVM) experts, and a former CEO of Tulip Software and a former consultant to the Obama administration in the United States, Madhav Deshpande, earlier this year told The Wire that EVMs cannot be hacked, because they are not connected to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or the Internet, they can be easily manipulated. He discussed two ways in which the voting can be manipulated. The first way is to do with the VVPAT machine and the way the present configuration of the three voting machines places the VVPAT between the ballot unit and the control unit.
The second way voting can be manipulated is through the control unit. Because any control unit can work with any ballot unit, it is theoretically possible to change the control unit after the voting has happened or to pre-load it with manufactured votes.