Thanks to KM’s blogpost, I was alerted to the news that Hari Prasad, an engineer who worked to expose the vulnerabilities of the EVM has now been arrested. Despite Hari Prasad and his colleagues’ evidence of the vulnerabilities in the EVM, the Election Commission of India maintains that the EVMs are tamper proof. This despite evidence of rampant irregularities in the 2009 elections, and a growing concern about the security of EVMs worldwide.

J. Alex Halderman, Hari K. Prasad, and Rop Gonggrijp

I am inclined to suspect that the Election Commission and the political parties are all in collusion to ensure that elections are rigged and done so quietly. Why else would an engineer be arrested for actually speaking the truth?

In fact, the EVMs are so poorly designed that the data isn’t even encrypted in the memory! Come on, even I know to design an EVM better than that! This means anyone can tap into the machine and read/write/alter the votes. Worse, you can actually attach a look-alike piece of hardware to the EVMs to alter the votes remotely through a mobile phone [For details here's the full technical paper]. This looks more like a feature than a bug to me. It looks like this was a deliberate decision to make it easier to sell the election results to the highest bidder.

Welcome to India, a country whose democracy has been bought and paid for. Anyone trying to rock that boat will not be tolerated.

The best reaction that US could give was that it was ‘disappointed’ (that is was ‘deeply disturbed’ and ‘urges’ Pakistan to return to democracy). Disappointed!? Is that it? Whatever happened to all the rhetoric about being pro-democracy and restoring democracy in the world one botched fiasco (translation: Iraq) at a time? But wait, isn’t Pakistan (translation: Musharraf) an ally in the American war of terror? So I guess anything that Musharraf does is pro-democracy, given that Bush and Mushrraf are bosom buddies and all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Washington tows Musharraf’s line on this one, viz. that he did it for democracy!