Do go through this counter to my concerns on VVPAT vulnerability by Gaurav @crazyphoton, a brilliant officer I have huge respects for. While he acknowledges the process loop-holes/concerns raised, the contention is that any systemic hacking shall be caught while tallying. 1/n
To start with, the concerns raised in the letter is appreciated & acknowledged as logical & serious critique on EVM vulnerability.
Assuming that it can be hacked, article then goes on to ask what is the probability of the nation knowing, if EVMs are systematically hacked.
Assuming that it can be hacked, article then goes on to ask what is the probability of the nation knowing, if EVMs are systematically hacked.
Article defines tallying of EVM count with VVPAT slips as the gold standard to know if EVM is hacked. While I do not agree here (I had earlier tweeted once you have access to VVPAT there are ways to manipulate so that it tally with EVM count) let us accept this premise for now.
Next an averaging out of EVMs per constituency & EVMs checked per constituency is done from total figures for LS, which again I do not agree with as elections are fought & won constituency wise. But going ahead with this premise, out of 3002 EVMs used, 38 are picked for tallying.
Here it is assumed that the rigging happened in 50 constituencies & in 1% or roughly 30 EVMs of 11050 votes. But for simplicity sake, let’s assume that it was a bye-election to only a single constituency. Rest of the assumptions we go ahead with.
Here is where as a returning officer, I would be seriously worried. Because winning margins are constituency wise, @crazyphoton’s analysis says an RO can only be 32% sure of the results if winning margin is less than 11,050. Just 32%. There were ~30 such PCs in 2019 elections.
I disagree on the suggestion that number of votes polled per constituency has any bearing on the confidence level as candidates win & lose even by 1 vote. In that case isn’t even 1 vote worth the risk? So it is the margin that’s critical & not the votes polled.
This says that if the margin is less than 1105, an RO is only 4% sure, with the margin at 11050, she is only 32% sure, and even with a margin as high as 22000, she is only 54% sure of the results of her constituency. Are we sure that this is how we want to conduct our elections?
And remember all this is assuming that VVPAT is not manipulated in a way that slips are printed to tally the EVM count. If that happens, even this low percentage of confidence also evaporates. How that can be done has been earlier explained by a few. I shall also elaborate later.
