The recently concluded Assembly elections in three states have put the focus back on the integrity of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM). Some say that the machines can be manipulated; others say these can be hacked to favour a particular candidate. The machines are sometimes labeled faulty and unreliable.

I recently attended a meeting in Maharashtra as the observer of the Election Commission of India (ECI) where this issue was hotly debated. Representatives of some political parties wanted us to ensure that the machines were not manipulated through remote control. On another occasion, a senior IT professional wondered: what if a software module is embedded in the hardware, hidden in the sleeper mode, that could be activated to corrupt the machine at a later time. He was drawing a parallel with the Bluetooth feature that Apple has provided in one of the models of their iPhone that is to be activated at a later date. Both apprehensions are reasonable.

To examine the veracity of such claims and apprehensions, the voting process through EVMs needs to be put into perspective. For the uninitiated, the EVMs comprise two interconnected units. The first, called the control unit, lets the polling official enable the voter to cast her vote once her identity is verified. This unit also stores and computes the poll-related data like number of votes polled for each candidate and total number of votes. In the second unit, called the ballot unit, the voter casts her vote by pressing a button alongside the name of the candidate and symbol of the political party.

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