The Most Powerful Security Feature Our EVMs are Missing — YOU.

Some of you believe EVMs can be hacked. Some of you believe EVMs cannot be hacked. Your battle has gotten ugly. Want to know the solution to the problem we have? Us.

I’m not being ideal, I’m being practical. Keep reading.

We keep a check on everything. Just talk to your relatives and you’ll know the extent to which everybody likes to keep tabs on everything. What if this tendency of ours were used for good? Well, Wikipedia happens. It is glorified gossip. People tell each other what they know, they also tell what the other what they don’t know and arrive at the most dynamic pool of knowledge in the world. Even RTI, most powerful weapon against corruption, is just people going, “Tell me! Tell me!”. So how do we use people’s need to gossip to make EVM more secure?

Let Us Find EVM’s Faults

The technical term for this is ‘Adversarial Testing’ but that doesn’t matter. It just means you let relatives find faults like they are enemies. You know we’re good at it. Some of us make a living just finding other’s faults.

So, the idea is Election Commission allows us to check the EVM and find faults with it. Currently, it isn’t allowed. You know what happens when it allows to check the faults? We find them.

In 2010, Washington tries internet voting for the first time. It invites people to find faults. MIT team checks it up and hacks it and leaves their theme music just to humiliate them.

Let Us Check If Our Votes Were Counted

The technical term for it is End-to-End-Verifiable-Voting but that doesn’t matter. It just means we get to tally our votes. Anybody who’s got groceries knows how much we love tallying things up. So, how do you tally the vote up?

This is a tricky one so stay with me. There are two twists in this story.

First twist, you can’t physically verify if the vote has gone to your party as of now. It’s not just an EVM issue. This issue is there in paper ballots too. You could put the stamped ballot paper in. But how would you know it’s the one that got counted? How would you know it didn’t get exchanged?

Here’s the second twist, even if you could verify your vote others shouldn’t know who you voted for. Else, you could be forced to vote for someone for sure. Or, I hope not, you could sell your votes for sure. You can still sell your vote but they never for sure if you took your money and voted for some other party. That keeps the selling in check, a little.

So, you want to get your vote counted but others shouldn’t know your vote. It’s partly like when Hanuman meets Sita. Ram wants confirm Hanuman’s met Sita and not someone else. For that, Sita gives Hanuman something that only Ram knows for sure, is from Sita — her very unique hairpin. So even when Ravana’s guards caught Hanuman and had seen the hairpin. They’d know he’d met someone but not exactly who. We’ll need some tech to do that for us. Take a look at this:

This is just one system. There are many more. For example, we have one system VVPAT. That’s good.

Still, if we’re allowed us to find faults with it, I’m sure we will. Now you may say, everything will have issues, if we focus only on them we will never choose a voting system. That’s a fair argument. To that I say, it is same with the leaders, every leader will have pros and cons. We get to discuss it and choose which pros we want for sure and which cons are you okay to live with. You have a say in it. You should also have a say in voting system. The idea is to know that you don’t blindly have to follow what’s being done. The power should be yours.

It sounds like a lot of hard work isn’t it? Don’t worry. Like any group project, there will always be some people who’ll actually get the work done. Even in Wikipedia, only a few contribute. But since we are so many people, it works. Even RTI worked the same way. Only a few of us filed it. And brought down the whole governments. All we need is just that power to be available.

So, whenever you feel like fighting with each other over EVMs, maybe instead of humiliating each other we fight for the right to empower each other. It worked, mostly, well for us in the freedom struggle. After all, the solution to our problems is us.