Correlation isn’t causation — the EVM edition

The space to disagree with the Election Commission’s position vis-à-vis the integrity of electronic voting machines without finding oneself backtracking into the Congress or the BJP camps is shrinking, and both national parties as well as the Supreme Court have been wilfully engendering this state of affairs at the expense of — ironically — logic.

The Congress on November 24, 2024:

Dr. Parameshwara, who was also the AICC observer for Maharashtra elections, told presspersons that his party leaders, including former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, discussed the EVM issues and were planning to appeal to the Election Commission of India (ECI) in this regard. “We are now sure that till the EVMs are used, there is no hope for the Congress or any other party other than the BJP. There is an urgent need to return to ballot papers,” he said.

The Supreme Court on November 26, 2024:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday (November 26, 2024) indicated a level of hypocrisy attached to criticism about Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), saying “EVMs are tampered when you lose and fine if you win”. The oral remark was made by Justice Vikram Nath before dismissing a petition filed by evangelist K.A. Paul, who sought a judicial order to return to paper ballots.

Also the Supreme Court in April 2024:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday underscored that it cannot ask the Election Commission of India (ECI) to disclose the source codes of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) as it can result in its misuse. The source code often called “the brain” refers to a set of instructions that tells the machine how to function. A Bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta made the observation while hearing a batch of petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of the vote count in EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips.

The BJP on November 27, 2024:

Taking a swipe at the Congress president over his latest remarks on the EVMs, BJP Lok Sabha MP and national spokesperson Sambit Patra also said Mr. Kharge can go to “planet Mars” taking Gandhi with him and “live there happily” if he doesn’t want electronic voting machines, Election Commission, Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation, judiciary and the Modi government.

And the Congress on November 30, 2024:

In his opening remarks to the CWC, party president Mallikarjun Kharge mentioned the electronic voting machines (EVMs) making the poll process “suspect”. And that set the tone for the speakers who followed him, as the discussions mostly focussed on EVMs and the Election Commission (EC).Veteran leader Digvijaya Singh was the first among CWC members to question EVMs. While Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Singhvi argued for a nuanced approach and pitched for 100 per cent voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT), Ms. Vadra said the party should press for a return to ballot paper. Mr. Gandhi urged his colleagues to “adopt a firm stand and take the issues to the hilt and convert it into a movement”.

We don’t need a "movement" because we don’t know that EVMs are the issue! This is a farce. It’s helping only the Congress — and then again only by fanning the flames of a misguided suspicion. The BJP’s overreach vis-à-vis many of the institutions of Indian democracy, including the Reserve Bank (RBI), the Enforcement Directorate (ED), and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has rendered all of them suspect, especially when some outcome goes the BJP’s way when it wasn’t expected to.

But a mismatch between expectations and outcomes alone can never be conclusive proof of malfeasance. Today many people harbour similar doubts about the Election Commission — and it’s easy to understand this isn’t implicitly unwarranted or even unfair. However, the Election Commission’s integrity vis-à-vis the tallies of votes cast in an election offers a handle on the situation that the RBI, ED, the CBI or any other such institution can’t offer: mathematics.

Contrary to the Supreme Court’s views about electronic voting machines (EVMs) harbouring some kind of “source code” that must be protected at all costs, EVMs are simple signal counters whose security arises from more sophisticated means. Their electronics are isolated from external sources of input and their ability to count votes is tested in a specific way at each polling booth before the machines are set up for public use. Indeed, as a counter of votes, ‘leaking’ the "source code" of EVMs is pointless because anyone can write it up on their own: it’s after all an algorithm to count how many different buttons are pushed, each of which produces a distinct signal.

But thanks to the Election Commission’s reluctance to submit its machines to independent testing and abetted by the Supreme Court’s refusal, inability or disinterest in the technical architecture of EVMs, any questions about the integrity of EVMs — specifically their abilities to count votes a specific way and of an external actor to interfere in this process — falls under the wheels of contempt of the Supreme Court or, thanks to the BJP’s habitual overreach, allegations of anti-nationalist activity. This is unfortunate.

EVMs make use of mathematics to operate just the way modern computers do. They both have the same fundamental components, just put together differently for different purposes. And just as it’s possible to test whether a computer is working as intended without taking it apart, it’s possible to test EVMs without taking them apart. Independent researchers can test an EVM without touching it, without in any way being able to access its constituent components (except to supply input signals and receive output signals), and without even knowing its internal logic — and with an Election Commission official monitoring the whole process.

Even Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Singhvi's demand for 100% VVPAT has met with a corresponding fate at the apex court (brought there by a different petitioner) — and yet which is similarly unnecessary. From The Hindu, April 15, 2024:

The VVPAT-based audit of EVMs … very similar to the “lot acceptance sampling technique” that is widely used in industry and trade. If the number of defectives found in a randomly drawn statistical sample is less than or equal to a specified acceptance number, the lot (or ‘population’) is accepted; otherwise, the lot is rejected. … The hypergeometric distribution model should form the basis of the sampling plan for the VVPAT-based audit of EVMs because it is an exact fit. In the discussion that follows, we assume the percentage of defective EVMs in the population (P) to be 1%, and calculate sample sizes, for various population sizes, for 99% probability of detecting at least one defective EVM. We also compute the probability that the ECI-prescribed sample size of “five EVMs per Assembly constituency” will fail to detect a defective EVM for different population sizes. The great merit of the hypergeometric distribution model is that the sample size is the greatest when P is very close to zero (which is what the ECI claims it is), and it becomes lesser as P increases. …

We can use the ‘plateau effect’ of sample sizes to divide the bigger States into ‘regions’ (an integral number of districts) with EVM population sizes of about 5,000 each. We treat “EVMs deployed in the region” as the ‘population’. On average, there would be about 20 Assembly constituencies in a region. The sample size required is 438 and the average number of EVMs per Assembly constituency whose VVPAT slips are to be hand counted is 22. For example, U.P with 1,50,000 EVMs can be divided into 30 regions with roughly 5,000 EVMs each. In the event of a defective EVM turning up, the hand counting of VVPAT slips of the remaining EVMs will confined to the region. This option is statistically robust and administratively viable.

But like the Supreme Court, the Congress isn’t interested in mathematical tests of EVMs’ integrity. This sounds bizarre because the Congress wants something the Supreme Court won’t give — but instead of disagreeing with the court’s refusal to have EVMs independently tested, which is where the problem really lies, the party has elected to disagree with the Indian government’s decision in the 1990s to switch paper ballots with EVMs.

A return to paper ballots is a terrible, terrible idea that forgets how much EVMs simplify the vote-casting activity (while removing ‘bad votes’) and speed up the whole process, all the way up to recounting, while requiring fewer safeguards to prevent mistakes or interference. But worse: neither the Congress nor any activists supporting the demand to revert to paper ballots can claim to understand how EVMs work or what really could be going wrong, if it is.

The party may lack a member with the skills to test the machines and the Election Commission may be disinclined to comply to requests — but this doesn’t mean “it’s working as intended” and “it’s not working as intended” are the only two possible outcomes here. There’s a third: “we don’t know”. And the ignorant views of both political and judicial leaders are eroding the space for this possibility in public dialogue.

Because the outcomes in the Maharashtra state assembly election defied the expectations of Congress et al., the party and its allies have stretched their latent distrust of the Election Commission to the extreme of assuming they also know the EVMs malfunctioned and/or the commission misbehaved. No one in this milieu is stopping to consider they don’t know something because they lack proof of malfeasance and/or misbehaviour.

Thus no one will pursue even a public debate on an independent democratic mechanism that acquires and places in the public domain data from the integrity tests of EVMs slated for use in specific elections. But they will pursue a (presumably) national "movement" by attributing with no evidence their loss in a recent election on EVMs with or without the Election Commission's imaginary complicity while demanding a return to a primitive voting system, and about which the commission and the national government will do nothing other than to make snarky comments while the Supreme Court issues uncritical remarks.