IS EVM Machines faulty?

IS EVM MACHINES FAULTY?

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Contact:  Center for National Renaissance,  Telugu Desam Party, Save Indian Democracy (US)
Email:     saveindiandemocracy.org@gmail.com
Web:      http://saveindiandemocracy.org
Ph:         981-015-6791 (India), 986-602-1393 (India),  732-368-0122 (US)
Conf Details: http://saveindiandemocracy.wordpress.com/conferences/

New Delhi (Jan 16, 2010):   Multiple events are being planned in India by Center for National Renaissance,  Political parties and other activists with well known International and National experts on Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) to address the EVM related issues in India vis-a-vis similar international developments related to the EVMs. 

International experts who are pioneers and have significantly altered the course of usage of EVM's in their countries are invited to India by Center for National Renaissance.  Details of experts from Netherlands, Germany, United States  drawn from legal, political and academic arenas in their countries is given below.  (Detailed bio-data is given at the end).

What is EVM and what are the issues related to EVMs?  EVMs are electronic voting machines that are used in India for more than two decades by Election Commission of India (ECI) during the elections and India went full with EVM in most recent two elections (2004 and 2009).    Many activists have been raising concerns about EVM as far back as 2001 but their increased usage has seen spate of PILs etc from different political parties, activists as well as demonstrations of tamper-ability on EVMs build based on published specifications.   The concerns are not just reliability of EVMs but serious allegations of tampering that altered elections outcomes.  

At the same time India was initially moving towards EVMs to use technology for improving efficiency,  internationally also several countries have moved into that direction with some making huge investments running into millions of dollars.   But what is the international scene today.   All over Europe  several countries (Germany, Netherlands, Ireland)

rejected EVMs or cancelled feasibility studies (Italy etc).  In US, more than 21 states banned EVMs or require paper trail and 18 additional states use paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.  

However, ECI informs us that Indian EVMs are special and somehow different from International EVMs and that concerns about Indian EVM's are misplaced.  But activists, technologists contest that position.   These conferences will throw light how Indian EVMs lack the many safeguards that international EVMs have and they  can be easily hacked (perhaps much more easily) than many Internationally used EVMs and if corrective actions are not taken, it will have serious implications to the democracy of the country. 

What is at core is the issue of transparency, as German Supreme Court has enumerated, the ability of a common voter understand the process from the time vote is cast to the counting of that vote to the candidate specified by the voter.  When that transparency is lost, the elections are greatly beholden to experts and election officials and leaves field open for fraud, potentially in a very large scale. 

The challenge in India is also that the public is under the impression that EVM solved many issues related to paper ballots such as booth capturing, booth stuffing etc and is viewed as using technology to improve efficiency.   However, the issues of larger issue of mass scale tampering without a trace with EVMs is not in their purview.

The planned activities are geared to bring an open discussion on these issues with international and national experts and help protect Indian Democracy.  

Details of international experts:

1) Rop Gonggrijp, Netherlands   Computer hacker, successful Entrepreneur who is instrumental in banning of EVMs in Netherlands due to security reasons, in spite of huge investments made by Netherlands in EVMs

Dr. Till Jaeger,  Germany   Attorney who argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned EVMs in German Elections

Dr. David Dill, USA   (via Video Conference) University of Stanford,  pioneer for reformation of usage of EVMs in US elections that resulted in 21 states in US either ban EVMs or require paper trail and additional 18 states require paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.   Founder of Verified Voting Foundation.  In 2004, Dr Dill received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" for "for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections." 

Dr. Alex Halderman, USA   Computer Science Professor, University of Michigan, noted expert of Electronic Voting Security who demonstrated first voting machine virus, lead team of Scientists from Princeton and Berkeley for "Top to Bottom" review of California EVMs.

Among multiple events planned are (Tentative list):  
http://saveindiandemocracy.wordpress.com/conferences/  has addition details.

1) Feb 12th:    11AM - 3PM,  Book Launch on EVM, India Habitat Center, Delhi
2) Feb 13th:    9AM - 5 PM,  Chennai Conference, Savera Hotel, Chennai

3) Feb 13th:    6:30PM    Talk/Discussion at IIT Chennai

4) Feb 15th:    All Party Meet, Constitution Hall, New Delhi

DETAILED BIO DATA OF INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS

Rop Gonggrijp, Netherlands   Computer hacker, successful Entrepreneur who is instrumental in banning of EVMs in Netherlands due to security reasons, in spite of huge investments made by Netherlands in EVMs

Born on Feb 14, 1968, Rop Gonggrijp is Dutch hacker, founder of internet service provider (IPS) XS4ALL, instrumental in exposing the vulnerabilities of Electronic Voting Machines to The Netherlands that resulted in banning of EVM machines in spite of huge investments made into them.   Mr. Gonggrijp  is now considered a key figure in the growing international movement for election transparency and verifiability.

Known as teenage hacker in his young days, Rop Gonggrijp founded hacker magazine Hack-Tic in 1988  and was considered major security threat by authorities of Netherlands.   In 1993, he and others around Hack-Tic founded ISP XS4ALL that is first ISP that offered internet access to private individuals which he sold the company to former enemy Dutch-Telecom.   After he left XS4ALL, he founded ITSX, a computer security evaluation company which was bought by Madison Gurkha in 2006.   In 2001, Mr. Gonggrijp started work on Cryptophone, a mobile telephone that can encrypt conversation.    Since 1989, Mr Gonggrijp has been main organizer of hacker events held every four years that are attended by thousands of hackers across the world.

After his home city of Amsterdam switched to electronic voting in 2006, mr. Gonggrijp started publicly questioning the security of the voting machines in use in The Netherlands as well as oppose the inherent lack of transparency when the vote count only happens inside a computer. With Amsterdam now also using computers, The Netherlands (pop. 17M) was 100% electronic voting. "We do not trust voting computers", the organisation founded by mr. Gonggrijp, has managed to convince the dutch public and government that the machines were not worthy of the trust placed in them.

After two government-appointed committees could do nothing but agree with the organization's point of view, voting computers were abolished and the country is now once-again voting using hand-counted paper ballots. The municipal election officials will probably never like the paper ballots as much as they liked the machines, but the recent elections for European Parliament passed without incident.

Mr. Gonggrijp also co-authored the CCC technical report on voting computers as requested by the German contitutional court and he is a key figure in the growing international movement for election transparency and verifiability.

Dr. Till Jaeger,  Germany   Attorney who argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned EVMs in German Elections

Born in Dec 1969,  Dr. Till Jaeger, is attorney from Germany who successfully argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned the usage of Electronic Voting Machines in Germany's elections for reasons of transparency and verifiability.

"Dr. Till Jaeger has been a partner at the law firm JBB Rechtsanwälte since
2001. He advises large and medium-sized IT businesses as well as government
authorities and software developers on matters involving contracts,
licensing and online use. Till Jaeger also covers conventional areas of
copyright law and entertainment law.

One particular focus of Till Jaeger’s work is on the legal issues created by
open source software. He is co-founder of the Institute for Legal Aspects of
Free & Open Source Software (ifrOSS), contributing to its work with academic
publications, lectures and seminars in the fields of software law and
copyright law.

Till Jaeger represented the physicist and software-engineer Dr. Ulrich
Wiesner at the German Constitutional Court in the proceedings regarding
complaints requesting the scrutiny of the elections to the 16th German
Bundestag. This lawsuit ended successful with the decision that the German
Federal Voting Machine Ordinance is unconstitutional for lack of
transparency and violation of the principle of democracy.

Till Jaeger graduated in law from the University of Mainz and has also
studied in Dijon, France. He started his legal clerkship in Brandenburg in
1996. After that, he was given a DFG scholarship to attend a post-graduate
course on EU law and the protection of personal rights in Munich. In
1999-2000 he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on copyright law at the Max Planck
Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition & Tax Law Munich."

Dr. David Dill, USA   (via Video Conference) University of Stanford,  pioneer for reformation of usage of EVMs in US elections that resulted in 21 states in US either ban EVMs or require paper trail and additional 18 states require paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.   Founder of Verified Voting Foundation.

David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineeringat Stanford University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). 

Prof. Dill has been working actively on policy issues in voting technology since 2003. He is the author of the "Resolution on Electronic Voting", which calls for a voter-verifiable audit trail on all voting equipment, and which has been endorsed by thousands of people, including many of the top computer scientists in the U.S. He has served on the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Task Force on Touch-Screen voting, the Citizens DRE Oversight Board of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, and on the IEEE P1583 Voting Equipment Standards Committee. He has testified on electronic voting before the U.S. Senate and the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III. He is the founder of the Verified Voting Foundationand VerifiedVoting.org and is on the board of those organizations. In 2004, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" for "for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections."

Prof. Dill has research interests in a variety of areas, including computational systems biology and the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. He has also done research in asynchronous circuit verification and synthesis, and in verification methods for hard real-time systems. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation.
Prof. Dill's Ph.D. thesis, "Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical Verification of Speed Independent Circuits" was named as a Distinguished Dissertation by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and published as such by M.I.T. Press in 1988. He was the recipient of an Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1988, and a Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research in 1991.
He has received Best Paper awards at International Conference on Computer Design in 1991 and the Design Automation Conference in 1993 and 1998. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems, and a Fellow of the ACM in 2005 for contributions to system verification and for leadership in the development of verifiable voting systems. In 2008, he received the first "Computer-Aided Verification" award, with Rajeev Alur, for fundamental contributions to the theory of real-time systems verification.

Dr. Alex Halderman, USA   Computer Science Professor, University of Michigan, noted expert of Electronic Voting Security who demonstrated first voting machine virus, lead team of Scientists from Princeton and Berkeley for "Top to Bottom" review of California EVMs

Born in Jan 1981,  Dr. John Alexander Halderman, is a Computer Science Professor from University of Michigan,  is noted expert on electronic voting security who demonstrated first voting machine virus, served as a technical expert in California's "Top to Bottom" voting systems review leading a team of scientists from Princeton and U.C. Berkeley.

J. Alex Halderman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where his research spans applied computer security and tech-centric public policy.  Professor Halderman is a noted expert on electronic voting security.  In 2006, he conducted the first public, independent security review of a touch-screen voting machine, the Diebold AccuVote TS, and demonstrated the first voting machine virus.  He later served as a technical expert in California's "Top-to-Bottom" voting systems review, leading a team of scientists from Princeton and U.C. Berkeley.  In addition to exposing voting security flaws, he has investigated ways to improve the security and efficiency of the election process by making smarter use of technology.

Professor Halderman earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University with a dissertation focused on studying computer security failures in order to strengthen future designs.  Besides electronic voting, his research interests include Internet security, data privacy, digital rights management, and cybercrime.  He was a founding member of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, where he continues to hold an appointment as a visiting research collaborator.

Website http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/.

Dr. Gitanjali Swamy,  PhD Berkeley, MBA Harvard,  (In 2000, demonstrated to then Election Commissioner M.S. Gill the vulnerabilities of chips in EVMs)

Awaiting Bio.