EVMs and Unanswered Questions – Part II

Recap from yesterday:

The serious questions being asked include:

• If the polling was not even complete how could “votes polled” data be available for all but 47 of the 8071 candidates?
• If EVM’s were secure with DEO/district collectors, and elections were not even held in many constituencies, how was the data for 8023 candidates or all but 47 of the 8071 candidates available to the ECI on files downloaded between these dates?

…If this is a Mistake, Why No Clarifications from the ECI?

Read on:

On the 6th of May Anupam and Prof Nalapat asked the ECI to clarify whether the spreadsheet that had “votes polled” for each candidate contained test data, actual votes polled or was it a wrong file?

On 31st May, they made another formal request to the ECI specifically asking:

Can you kindly indicate what the data in the CandidateAC downloaded from http://eci.nic.in/candidateinfo/frmcandidate.aspx file between the 6th and 15th is? Why is the Final votes polled data not uploaded till date at this location? When do you plan to upload it?”

On the 7th of July 2009, they sent another, more detailed request for clarification.

The response of ECI?

Nothing…no comment at all.

This is hardly reassuring and raises all kinds of questions. The most important – however outrageous it may sound – being: “Were the results of some Lok Sabha constituencies decided even before polling?”

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As Anupam and Prof Nalapat noted in their article in Covert, there are not too many ways in which the information about “votes polled” in the spreadsheet on the ECI website could have changed BEFORE the results were actually announced.

Realistically, this could have only happened if:

1. Someone had hacked the file.
2. The data from various EVMs had been uploaded to the private database, and this was used to create the public file.
3. Someone who had access to the private database had actually added the data.

In their own words (emphasis mine):

The first possibility is serious, as it implies that the databases hosted by the ECI are not secure and can be compromised. The second is a violation of the ECI’s rule that no counting was to begin till 16 May. It also constitutes a breach of security, as the EVMs were supposed to be in safe custody in a strong room of the DEO [district election officer]. The third would imply that the election results were being decided by whoever had access to the private database. If the results were to be read only from the EVMs, why was a coded spreadsheet prepared? How could this spreadsheet have the data on “votes polled”?

Sceptics might say that the coded data containing information on the votes polled was test or dummy data. If so, why was this test or dummy data prepared? What was being tested? How was this test data generated? What were the results of the tests? Why was the data generated after the first three phases of polling, but before the fourth and fifth phases? Why was the data removed when there was no intention of loading real data into the file? Why was the dummy data coded? How do 108 winning candidates in the dummy data match the eventual winners?

If you are still not convinced that something has gone wrong somewhere, this last bit will probably clinch the argument:

The various versions of the files downloaded from ECI website by Nalapat-Saraph on 6th, 7th and 11th May and the data were merged together along with the final results found on ECI site on June 2nd…

2. Candidates in every constituency were ranked as 1, 2 and 3 on the basis of the votes seen in ECI excel sheets on 6th, 7th and 11th May.
3. Then the same candidates were ranked within each constituency based on the votes recorded on June 2nd spreadsheet by ECI.

The Result?

1. Out of 543 constituencies, we find 106 winning positions (rank 1) matched for all four dates
2. 80 candidates matched for the rank 2 and
3. 59 for the rank 3…

Basic probability theory suggests that such a coincidence is practically impossible…

So what exactly was happening?

Will we ever find out? I am not hopeful.

Interestingly, buried within the avalanche of “breaking stories”, I found this snippet in the ET last week (emphasis mine):

CPM leaders (Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury), accompanied by member secretariat V Srinivasa Rao and a technical expert Prabir Purkayastha, told the commission and technical experts present at the meeting that both hardware and software should be in public domain. Further, it said the chips manufactured by ECIL, BEL should be allowed for yearly random third-party inspections either by NIC or IITs.

…They said these steps were necessary to ‘restore the ‘confidence’ in EVMs as there have been “reporting of errors in some machines and discrepancies in results”.

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Related Post: On EVMs and Some Unanswered Questions