EVMs can be manipulated in elections: Confesses Election Commission

The Election Commission of India has made an amazing confession: that the security and integrity of the entire election system will be compromised if the EVM software and the hardware design becomes known.

This is what technologists, activists and political leaders have been saying for many months now and the Commission had steadfastly refuted such claims with a bizarre “our EVMs are fully tamper proof“ claim.

The above revelation was made by the Election Commission in a letter dated March 30, 2010 to V.V. Rao, petitioner in the Supreme Court on the EVMs. I quote below:

“The Commission is concerned that commercial interests could use the route of reverse engineering (a process by which the original software and hardware configuration can be accessed) which may compromise the security and sanctity of the entire election system.”

It is once again made clear that any demonstration of alleged tamperability cannot include reverse-engineering as it compromises security and sanctity of the entire election system.€

Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device through analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking a device and analyzing its workings in detail to make a new device or program that does the same thing without utilizing any physical part of the original.

In a nutshell, the concept behind reverse-engineering is to break something down in order to understand it and build a copy or improve it.  This process was originally applied only to hardware. Reverse-engineering is now applied to software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/65532/Reverse_Engineering

There are many instances of reverse engineering by academicians and ethical hackers to unravel the EVM software and understand its hardware configuration. Scientists across the world resort to reverse engineering to expose the vulnerabilities of the electronic voting systems. This is indeed necessary to plug the security holes in voting systems which can be exploited by miscreants. Many such successful attempts have attracted international attention and led to reform in electronic voting systems.

Read Detailed Reports exposing the EVM Frauds at
http://www.indianevm.com/index.php

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