Some technological issues with elections.

This post was long due given that it stems from an experience about 2 months ago. Whenever I need to understand something I go to a person who seems knowledgeable in that subject and talk to him/her. In this regard I have had a chat about various technological issues asssociated to voting, with a Theoretical Computer Science prof at TIFR (my current instutute) and in general my experience has been that people in the Theoretical Computer Science do have an amazing level of clarity with thinking and precision about everything they do.
I have a great admiration for people in this field.

So this prof is very young. May be just 5 years older to me. He recently got his PhD in the subject from UIUC (USA).He is a Keralite and did his B.Tech from IITKgp.

So here are the few insights that we generated during the discussion.

It isn't very clear that the use of EVMs has really made the voting process very significantly fair. Now it is just a matter of what kind of forces the political parties need to harness to rig the elections. Earlier it used to be local goons and thugs and now it probably has to be some electronics engineers and techie people. We have often joked about the possibility of the political parties going for "campussing" in the IITs and other such engineering institutes hiring tech people.

Earlier we have heard of such things happen in West Bengal: that therewould be a hole in on the top of the election room and a person would be sitting on the roof watching through the hole as to whom the person inside voted! This guy would be employed by the party X and if the person inside the booth didn't vote for part X then he would give a signal to the thugs outside from the roof-top , so that as soon as the person comes out he/she gets bashed up the goons.

This is where EVMs have definitely made a difference. "Secret Ballot" has become a little more secret than usual. But it hasn't probably made mcuh of a difference to the rigging situation. Thre have anyway been n number of claims of the EVM circuit being tweaked by some party the night before in the godown where the EVMs are kept.

Now the issue is what about the problem of people not being able to vote because of not being present in their constituency during their voting. This rule definitely needs to be changed given that such a large section of the youth voters live in the hostels of the various colleges far away from their home-towns. It would be a huge transportation chaos if all of the students have to be come home during the election date. They can have exams and what not. So it seems that there is good enough reason to start electronic voting and sms-voting.

The obvious issue with electronic voting is that of online identity resolution. (and there are slightly more non-obvious problems which I shall come on later) But then it isn't very clear why simple solutions like a password protected site with Captcha will not solve the problem. Only glitch being that since we have anyway experience of the "great" internet abilities of the Indian government it might be a good idea to lease out the running of these web-pages and voting sites to professional web-development companies.

And with sms voting the identity resolution seems to be slightly at stake unless we can develop some very sophisticated phones. In the common cell-phoes it is easily possible for a same person to cast multiple sms votes and I am not sure how password protected voting will work on cell-phones. Sms voting reminds me of the consistent fraud which hapenned with these reality-music shows which used sms-voting. Where the parents of the contestants distributed money in their localities to motivate people to send multiple smses in favour of their kids.

Now if we can develop very sophisticated phones which have say an iris pattern recognition system built on them which will get linked to the voting website as soon as the person logs into it. So the website will allow only 1 vote per iris pattern. But phones with such technologies to get into the market will probably take 50 more years.

Now consider the slightly non-obvious problem with internet voting. Imagine a person with a laptop going into a locality with a gun in his hand and asking all the people to vote for party X on the website by logging in to the web-site infront of him. Done! End of all election systems. With internet voting the "secretness" of the ballot will probably be totally gone. But then the issue of bribing the electorate for getting votes becomes a little more lucrative for the parties since now one can "see" whom the guy voted for. Now the parties can start "paying" for the votes only when the vote has been cast *infront of them*! The guy can come with a suitcase of cash and a laptop and a gun and sit with it and ask the people to queue infront of him. And then ask them to come up one by one and cast their vote in the net infront of him so that he is sure that they have voted for his party and then he will hand over the 1000Rs to the person.

So with internet voting there is greater "incentive" for the corrupt parties to bribe the electorate while the guarantee of return on the money used in bribing was less with EVM or the paper ballot. In EVMs and paper ballot the party has to pay the voter *before* the casting of the vote and there is no way for the party to check whether the bribed guy double crossed him! Hence with internet voting things can literally be "cash for vote" (With verification!). Hence a simple internet voting jeopardizes the sitaution further by giving greater incentive to corruption.


But a slight change in the mechanism of the voting web-site one can probably gain greater fairness with all the advantages of internet voting kept intact: By using something which we called the "last vote registering". Here the voter is allowed to vote multiple number of times and only his/her last vote will be counted for. So what happens is that even if the voter is forced to vote for a certain party infront of the man with the guna and cash he/she can still go back home or later sneak into a cyber-cafe somehwre and cast his vote again. Here the corrupt party loses all incentive for bribing since what this bribed guy votes infront of him can be completely reversed later!

But there will still be a way out for the really desperate and corrupt party. The corrupt party can ensure that except for the places where it has his men with laptop guns and cash at all other places the network is snapped of. So that all homes and cyber-cafes in the area don't have internet connection on that day. But even such a desperate attempt will not be able to deter the dedicated voter since she/he can stil vote *again* by going to her/his office which is likely to be far away from her/his locality and have an interbnet connection.

To end it my primary concern being not the fairness of the election process but the lives of the election officers lost in the election process in India. I consider them to be "martyrs" at the same level of respect as soldiers who die in the battlefield defending the nation. They fought for democracy and lost their lives.

It is a matter of great shame that even in this recent election in India so many election officers lost their lives.
My interests in looking at newer technologies of voting is to eliminate this concept of "election officers".

In response to "Aazadi.."

I had thought of putting this up as a comment on my colleague Pratish's post but then I thought it was too long to be be a comment and hence it became a quick post.
{Further somehow my comment didn't get registered! Some technical snag.}

5 points in response:

1. Your data about the financial aspect of the Indian elections and the GDP hike are probably taken from here.

Thanks to Vipul for pointing out this link to me.

2. The Indian Constitution is definitely a magnificently precise document and aptly called the "Lawyer's Paradise". A research paper like precision was the need to keep such a diverse and complex country together and it was the genius of Dr.Ambedkar to forsee this.

But then again its immense complexity also gives rise to a million loop holes which have time again been abused.

Further the Indian Constitution has not been able to produce an Uniform Civil Code and most sorrowfully the marriage acts of India are still religion based. This a cause for utmost shame for India.

Indian Constitution definitely needs a thorough revision and updating.

3. The fact that Indian electorate this time was 741 million is a big blotch on the image of India. It only shows how terribly we have failed to do population control and how miserably the education system has failed.

India will one day pay heavily for this stark neglect of primary education and politicization of higher education.
4. I strongly oppose your view that democracy is in the Indian psyche. Far from it.

It has been only 62 years India has been a democracy and never ever before that in its 3000 year old history has it ever been a democracy. I think 62 years is too short a time for the common man to internalize and understand the tremendously abstract and subtle idea of democracy. Comparatively US has been having elections for about the last 200 years.

Ever so often Indian masses indulge in idolatry and someone gets hailed as the "king" or the "queen" and ever so often some politician gets termed as the "kingmaker". We are still to come out of thinking in terms of "malik" (owner) and "naukar" (servant) and these terms get used in India for every form of hierarchy whereas in reality NO hierarchy should be termed so. And so often so employees in an office call their boss as "saheb" (a term which originates from the address to British officers!)

India has a long long way to go to attain true democratic status. Success of democracy goes hand in hand with the penetration of education in the society and the status of the later in India is dismal to say the least.

But yes definitely this year the Indian Electorate has shown considerable maturity and intelligence by virtually killing so many corrupt people and parties working along divisive lines of caste and religion and regional issues and opportunists.

But the fact that some such elements have still made it through says that we as a nation still have a long way to go.

5. If in the last 3000 years of Indian history there is one thing that has time and again defined India is its scientific creativity and research potential. 2000 years ago when civilizations were being born elsewhere India had produced the mathematics of calculus and theory of infinite series and predictive astronomy and plastic surgery (including even the science of doing amputations without causing infections!) and amazing level of phenomenological medical knowledge.

And not to mention the terrific rise of architectural brilliance in the 18th century. India had then been an exceptional engineering heaven.

Sorrowfully this essential identity of India gets strongly deprioritized by the Indian democracy and the election choices. There are just so few people in the parliament from the scientific fields and almost never does science education and research gets mentioned as the prime concern of the government. If India has to become the major world player in this century it has to ensure exponential growth in its scientific and academic efforts.

Indian elections are yet to mature to reflect this reality.

Aazadi..

Came by this interesting story while reading the newspaper a few days ago - A small village girl was waiting by the side of the dusty road for her poor, illiterate father. "Aapke pocket mai kya hai, abba?", she asked curiously looking at his decrepit face. The father put his hand in the pocket and removed a voter ID card. "Yeh hai meri Aazadi", he smiled.

When an illiterate man can understand the power that that a voter ID card has, why can't the so-called educated class? Or are we so pompous that we should not care? Are we so above 'mediocrity' that we should be obtuse to matters relevant to development of our own motherland? More than 60 years after India gained Independence, if there is one thing that holds this diverse country together, it's this loktantra. The democracy philosophy is etched deeply in the Indian psyche, and no matter what skeptics say, there is nothing that can beat it. With a registered voter base of over 714 million Indians [something which some continents don't even have as net population], this election in India can surely be called as the biggest democratic exercise on the planet. I read somewhere that this time, about $3 billion were spent by parties and candidates on advertising, transportation, endorsements and, you guessed right, bribing. It is expected to give an almost 0.5% stimulus to India's GDP for 2 quarters this year, according to Kotak Securities. The number of polling officials employed by the Election Commission was a staggering 46 lakh. This is just mind-boggling. No wonder foreign countries are simply in awe of this mammoth event. I read in the newspaper few days ago that some countries sent their representatives and Election Commission officials to learn a lesson or two from the Indian Election Commission. Democracy is the best gift that our founding fathers bestowed upon us. We may criticize Pandit Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar, Sardar Patel and others every now-and-then, but it was due to their extreme love for the country that we lead a stable life today. It is because of their cautiousness and thoughtfulness that an event as large, complex and sensitive as this can pass smoothly with minimal hiccups. They rightly have been called visionaries, great men who put the country before their individual egos. Maybe, 150 years of British rule taught us the right lessons at the right time to stay united. India truly was blessed with able leaders at that time. Else, with a diversity much more complex than our own neighbor, we would not have even survived like a fragile nation that Pakistan is now. Sometime back, me and my brother [who too, is interested in politics and matters alike] were comparing some data about the Indian Constitution that he had. We compared our Constitution with the that of countries like France, USA and Argentina. That was one occasion when I really felt proud about my country. But I felt a little ashamed too. I realized how much efforts our past leaders had made in making a near flawless rule-book in the hope that this great nation will never have to face internal or external threats and how conveniently indifferent we have been all along. Even a non-expert like me could easily distinguish and appreciate the level of sophistication invested in the making of our Constitution. It made me realize the base on which our country is founded is so firm and strong.

But why then do we face so much ambiguity when it comes to forming a Government now at the Centre? Why, for the past 20 years has there not been even one single party Government? Why do the major parties have to dance to the whims and fancies of minor, regional parties every single time? This is the real, valid internal threat to India's democracy. And it seems the voter community shrewdly realized this and punished the regional netas [like Sharad Pawar, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Smt. Mayawati] to some extent this time. More than 300 parties contested this national election, 7 of whom were deemed national parties [both numbers are just hilarious]. In the event of a fractured mandate, the following things are likely to happen -
1] Immense behind-the-stage bribing and horse-trading [which is evident in some ways already].
2] No matter how accommodating everybody is, it will remain a fragile formation with a constant threat of Government collapse. One partner gone and it could be Game Over.
3] Instead of being a National Government taking decisions of national consensus, every time some regional player will try to extract his 'pound of flesh' by hijacking national policy meetings with petty regional issues. This inevitably will drag down development and correctly indicate that the Government is like a directionless boat.

It took 150 years for this country to realize the virtues of staying united. Do we want to tread down that same nasty road? Do we want history to repeat itself? It's high time we valued the Aazadi that we have been bestowed upon before our country breaks down again into tiny fiefdoms. As I said before, based on this election's mandate, the people of India seem to have been alerted to this possibility, but not in entirety. It is the voter's responsibility to finish off this threat forever.

PS : On a personal note, I did NOT vote this time. I was staying in a random place [in the constituency of Chennai] of which I really know nothing. Had I been in Pune, I definitely would have voted, for I know what matters and what's going on. So, it was rather disappointing when I found out that only 40% of the people in Pune voted. Next time, if I'm in a well-acquainted place, I will note lose my chance; because, as they say, "no vote, no opinion."

Note : This article has also been posted on my other personal blog : this

NoCriminals

Useful data compiled by National Election Watch for the 2004 general elections

Criminal Cases by State

State	Total seats	Criminal Cases	% of state
Daman and Diu	1	1	100%
Jharkhand	14	7	50%
Goa Maharashtra Punjab Bihar Kerala Uttar Pradesh NCT of Delhi	2	1	50%
	48	19	40%
	13	5	38%
	37	13	35%
	20	6	30%
	80	23	29%
	7	2	29%
Gujarat	26	7	27%
Chhattisgarh	11	3	27%
Madhya Pradesh	29	7	24%
Tamil Nadu	39	8	21%
Karnataka	28	6	21%
Haryana	10	2	20%
Orissa	21	3	14%
West Bengal	42	5	12%
Rajasthan	25	3	12%
Andhra Pradesh	42	4	10%
Andaman and Nicobar	1
Arunachal Pradesh	2
Assam	14
Chandigarh	1
Dadra & Nagar Haveli	1
Himachal Pradesh	4
Jammu and Kashmir	6
Lakshadweep	1
Manipur	1
Meghalaya	2
Mizoram	1
Nagaland	1
Puducchery	1
Sikkim	1
Tripura	2
Uttarakhand	5
Total	539	125	23%

C

Criminals Cases by Party

Party	Total	Criminal	% of
	MPs	cases	party
JMM	5	5	100%
SHS	12	7	58%
NCP	9	5	56%
SAD	8	4	50%
BSP	19	8	42%
JD(U)	8	3	38%
RJD	21	8	38%
AIFB	3	1	33%
JD(S)	3	1	33%
SP	36	11	31%
CPI	10	3	30%
DMK	16	4	25%
LJNSP	4	1	25%
MDMK	4	1	25%
BJP	138	29	21%
INC	145	26	18%
CPM	43	7	16%
BJD	11	1	9%
AGP	2
AIMIM	1
AITC	2
BNP	1
IFDP	1
IND	4
JKN	2
JKPDP	1
KEC	1
MNF	1
MUL	1
NLP	1
NPF	1
PMK	6
RLD	3
RPI(A)	1
RSP	3
SDF	1
SJP®	1
TDP	5
TRS	5
Total	539	125	23%

Data obtained from NoCriminals.org
Please don't vote the candidate who has criminal background.