Jaya quotes US expert, wants EVMs scrapped

J Jayalalithaa reiterated on Wednesday her demand for discarding electronic voting machines (EVMs) and returning to traditional ballots.

“EVMs are not infallible, they can be tampered with and elections manipulated to suit ruling parties,” the AIADMK general secretary said from her holiday home, Kodanad Estates in Ooty.

Quoting from an October 8, 2008, report in ScienceDaily, in which Rice University associate professor Dan Wallach demonstrated to students how easy it was to wreak havoc on computer software used in EVMs, Jayalalithaa said, “Most advanced countries around the globe have tried and discarded EVMs for the simple reason that they work on a pre-fed programme. And any programme made by man can be de-programmed or re-programmed.”

ScienceDaily had quoted Wallach saying, “It is very easy to insert subtle changes to the voting machine. If someone had access to machines and the knowledge these students have, they surely could rig votes. In the real world, voting machines’ software is much larger and complex than the hack-a-vote machine we use in class. We have little reason to believe the certification and testing process used on genuine voting machines would be able to catch the kind of malice that our students do in class. If this happened in the real world, real votes could be compromised and nobody would know.”

There are no means to ascertain or prove tampering or hacking of EVMs in a court of law. Unless the EVM simultaneously generates a physically-verifiable hard copy at the time of voting, it would be impossible to ascertain the veracity of any complaints of tampering, Jayalalithaa explained.