The Election Commission of India’s latest website update of its Frequently Asked Questions on electronic voting machines addresses a vulnerability that IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan had raised in 2019.
The January 30 update comes at a time when the Opposition and civil society have upped the ante against the voting machines ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
Question 86 in the FAQs deals with how signals flow between the three components of the current M3 voting machine: the ballot unit (BU), control unit (CU), and the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) machine.
The poll panel’s answer: “CU always acts as Master, irrespective of the position in which it is placed or connected. BU and VVPAT act as Slave units in the connected network, which receive commands from CU to act as per the application programme.
“BU and VVPAT do not communicate with each other. It is the CU that communicates with both the BU and VVPAT. When a voter presses a candidate button on BU, the BU sends the button number to CU and in turn, the CU communicates to VVPAT to print the slip of the corresponding button number. Only after printing and cutting of the printed VVPAT slip, the CU registers the vote.”
The answer explains with a diagram how signals flow between the three components.
“Communication on the bus is initiated by the ‘Master’ (CU) with a ‘Command’ to a ‘Slave’ (BU & VVPAT). The ‘Slave’ which is constantly monitoring the bus for ‘Commands’ will recognise only the ‘Commands’ addressed to it and will respond by performing an action and by returning a ‘Response’. Only the Master can initiate a command.”
Gopinathan, who was returning officer for Dadra and Nagar Haveli in the 2019 parliamentary polls, quit later that year over the “suspension of fundamental rights” after the removal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status and the detention of politicians in the erstwhile state.
Although he is no longer in service, his resignation has not yet been formally accepted.
In a Twitter (now X) thread after his resignation, Gopinath had claimed that although the BU and CU by themselves were tamper-proof, the introduction of VVPATs in 2013 on the Supreme Court’s directions had inadvertently created a vulnerability because of the way the machines are connected.
The VVPAT is the only component in the system that can be reprogrammed, and this is done for every election to reflect the particular set of candidates and symbols in that election.
Gopinath had explained that a malware introduced in the VVPAT would be hard to detect as, during voting, “the wrong printing can be caught, but not right printing and wrong registering”.
The poll panel had then said that “rigorous scrutiny” was being done by its technical experts committee of four IIT professors. Its latest update on January 30 suggests that the architecture of signal flow in the system trumps the vulnerability that the officer had claimed.
Gopinathan, who currently runs an AI news translations start-up in Pune, told The Telegraph that he was busy and could only respond after examining the poll panel’s explanation.
The technicalities apart, he said: “A fair election is one where the voter has agency to verify the vote, and the candidate can verify counting. The current process fulfils neither. Verification would mean the ability to accept or reject what is registered on the VVPAT slip that one sees.”
He added: “The Conduct of Election Rules say that in case of a mismatch between the CU and VVPAT vote tallies (five are tallied in every Assembly segment), the latter is to be counted for that machine. Thus, the EC itself considers the VVPAT more reliable than the CU. Then why does it rely on the CU count for the overall result?”