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EVM Hackable or Not

From : Shubham Sahu

Agenda:-What is an EVM.How does it looks like.How does Blackbox looks like.Is EVM hackable.How the EVM is tampered.How to avoid this from

happening.

What is EVM:- An Electronic Voting Machine consists of two Units – a

Control Unit and a Balloting Unit – joined by a five-meter cable.

The Control Unit is with the Presiding Officer or a Polling Officer and the Balloting Unit is placed inside the voting compartment. Instead of issuing a ballot paper, the Polling Officer in-charge of the Control Unit will press the Ballot Button.

The EVMs were commissioned in 1989 by Election Commission of India in collaboration with Electronics Corporation of India Limited. 

The Industrial designers of the EVMs were faculty members at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. The EVMs were first used in 1982 in the by-election to North Paravur Assembly Constituency in Kerala for a limited number of polling stations.

How does an EVM look like:-

How does an EVM looks from inside:-

Is EVM hackable:-A lot of people have said if something as

safe as a bank account can be hacked, why not an EVM. Hacking would require an EVM to be connected to Internet but EVMs have no internet connection. So, hacking an EVM is not possible.

BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE TEMPER WITH AN EVM… LET’S SEE…

Tempering with an EVM:- An attacker with brief access to EVMs can tamper with

votes and potentially change election outcomes. We demonstrate two attacks that involve physically tampering with the EVMs’ hardware.

First, we show how dishonest election insiders or other criminals could alter election results by replacing parts of the machines with malicious look-alike parts. Such attacks could be accomplished without the involvement of any local poll officials.

Second, we show how attackers could use portable hardware devices to change the vote records stored in the machines. This attack could be carried out by local election officials without being detected by the national authorities or the EVM manufacturers.

Safeguards against these attacks are either absent or woefully inadequate.

Time for a video:-

Can the problems with EVMs be fixed? Not easily. The entire class of voting

systems to which these EVMs belong has inherent problems that stem from a lack of transparency. They force voters to trust software and hardware without proper means of verification.

The Election Commission likes to speak of "checks and balances", with various procedures believed to make fraud harder. Drastically improving procedures might make some kinds of fraud more difficult, but cannot eliminate the risks we describe.

Frequently asked questions:-Is there any way to prove that

the EVM has been compromised?How the fact that the machine is

tampered does not come across during moch elections?

Does the political parties know which EVM is going to be placed in which sector?

Sources:-indiaEVM.orgindianEVM.orgwikipedia.comeci.gov.inVideo URL:

https://youtu.be/ZlCOj1dElDY

Q&A