Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Kejriwal and EVM tampering

For the elections in UP among other states, AAP claims the polls were rigged with the EVM (electronic voting machines) and they even had one of their nerdy MLA to build up a mock EVM and demonstrate in the Delhi assembly as to how it can be hacked. I was very keen to understand the modus operandi and did watch the video on NDTV. For starters media got it wrong, he never said swap the motherboard. His contention is “there is a code that can be programmed to any EVM that will make sure all votes balloted will be counted in favor of one party only and no others”, he further goes to say “depending on where in the ballot list the party to be favored is listed the code will be different” and to quote his own words “tampering happens on election day after 10:00am and code will be entered by one of the party workers and not 2 days before when the EVM’s are mock tested in front of all contesting parties” .

I appreciate the MLA taking his time to build a mock EVM (sad, he didn’t get a loaner from election commission) and his effort and eloquence with which he explained the whole process. I am sure this is just a hoax and here is my data to prove it.

Assuming all above said is true, let’s take UP elections there were 403 seats and close to 2095 candidates from 20 odd parties contesting. For the whole of UP, there were 306 polling HQ’s and each had an average 400 or so polling booths and if I assume 5 EVM per polling booth it would be a total of 612,000 EVM to be tampered with.

So, I would need at a minimum 500000 (assuming some will vote multiple times) men/women (registered to vote) who are extremely disciplined, trusted and can be handed the code to enter to each EVM to be tampered. Again from the MLA’s own words the code is different depending on the serial order of your party on the ballot box and hence I cannot blanket distribute a code for all of them. So, we would need a minimum of 100-200 different numbers to be circulated among these folks.

For sake of argument, any party needs to win half the seats to be in majority. That could cut down the requirement to 310,000 add to that the collusion with the election officers in each polling booths and the hierarchy needed to maintain this many people in line and to expect not a single one of them come out to the media or threaten to come out on media. 

Are we kidding ourselves, even the Indian army cannot handle this kind of massive effort stealthily. One can argue the election happened in phases even then the number of people required to pull off a scam like this is truly mind boggling, I don’t understand why no one in the media is raising this question? 

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