Whenever the use of EVMs became an issue, the election commission strongly defended its use in the judiciary and in other places with the help of technicians, designers and manufacturing experts. As of now the Honourable Supreme Court of India has again taken up this matter afresh, so in a larger interest of the Country and to restore the faith of the people in democracy the election commission must also present before the Court those expert hackers who carried out two attacks on real EVMs and made video presentation.
We do not question the perennial claim of the Election Commission that the EVMs are under the safe custody and it cannot be reached by anybody. The ECI also accept the fact that it does not produce the EVMs but takes the services of other companies in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The manufacturers and the ECI have never released a detailed technical description of the EVMs’ inner workings (EVM Hardware), citing security and intellectual property concerns.
The Software is manufactured by the Japanese company and Microchip by an American company. The most dangerous fact is that before CPU Manufacture the EVM firmware is stored in masked read-only memory inside the microcontroller chips, and there is no provision for extracting it or verifying its integrity. This means that if the software was modified before it was built into the CPUs, the changes would be very difficult to detect. Therefore, in a most humble way I would like to request ECI to stop the use of EVMs and start using ballot voting system in the country again.
Father Dr. Anand Muttugnal
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
