Indian Voting Machines Compared with Diebold

Hanuman_Ji writes "The Indian general elections, 2004 is now complete - and the result is an upset. As reported earlier, this election was conducted entirely through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). This article gives a nice overview of the machines used in this process and also adds a comparison with the Diebold machines. More information is also available at the equipment manufacturer's website."

Elegant

What an excellent and well written article! It all comes down to this: The folks in India are using a simple system that seems quite secure and uses assembly language only. They had a national election where nobody traveled more than 2KM to vote. The hardware and software are of the K.I.S.S. school of thought. They (Indians) don't spend millions and millions of dollars to stamp out the remote possibility of someone bringing high-tech equipment into the voting booth and hanging out a while while they copy cards, hack the system, etc. inorder to cast more than one vote. Prior to reading this article I had no idea how complex and cumbersome the Diebold system is. God, no wonder there have been so many problems with it. All-in-all, the Indian solution is very elegant in comparison.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:Elegant

Not everyone in India is poor. Kinda like not everyone in the US is a cowboy. Besides, you don't need a ton of people to stuff a bollot box. You need one person and a lot of votes. Besides, someone that politically motivated has connections or they are willing to aquire things by shady means anyways.

Re:Elegant

I second that. I dont think I've seen such a good article discussing how the machines work in such an easy format to read. The US could learn a few things from these Indians. I think the most important things they have over Diebold are: Simple (technical and user interaction) interface, the control unit idea/system seems to work rather well, physical security is the concern rather than hacking, and a rediculous lower cost compared to Diebold ($230 vs $3300 I think).

Re:Elegant

The thing that I like best about the Indian system is that it essentially duplicates the old-fashioned paper ballot, without the paperwork. Instead of a box that the voter puts his ballot in there's a little electronic box that adds up the votes as it goes along. The control boxes are physically taken to the central voting registry and manually unlocked to record the vote counts, with interested parties having immediate access to the results and the ability to do a precinct-level recount almost immediately.

Notice what's not there: no network to expose data to possible manipulation between voting machine and central server; no fancy machine lacking tamperproof seals; no fancy database with built-in unpassworded backdoor "for support purposes"; no MS software anywhere in the loop; no manufacturer's president sworn to "delivering the vote" for an incompetent incumbent. It's those last couple of items which will prevent the adoption of the Indian system in this country.

Just my $.02,
Ron

Re:Elegant

Yes, we do need the massive complexity of Diebold or similar systems to run American elections.

no, we need something simple yet scalable. The two are not mutually exclusive. Anything built on top of Windows is needlessly complex.

Re:Elegant

I am very much an advocate of simple methods. However, I am not sure if the Indian model (or the Diebold machines for that matter) would handle the practicalities involved in a typical US election.

The Indian machine seems to handle voting for a single person for a single elected post. If someone needed to cast votes for many different electoral positions, they would need to move from machine to machine (and presumably would end of with a long of inky fingers in rainbow colours). It is not clear how "propositions" would be handled. It should be noted that many electoral systems require voting for multiple candidates for the same position. Here, the Indian system would clearly not work.

One objection to the Indian system, for use in the U.S., relates to the ink itself. Someone, somewhere would have an allergic reaction to the ink and would sue for about a trillion dollars.

I agree with other posters that an open source solution of some kind is needed. The process needs to be 100% transparent while protecting the secrecy of individual votes. I disagree with those that say it is not difficult: it jolly well IS.

Re:Elegant

LOL, I laughed at that rainbow comment. I have voted on EVMs before and it is not machine to machine or getting your hands sprayed by ink. You get your finger marked once and in the same EVM you cast multpile votes. As for example when I was voting I was voting for State elections as well as national elections and I did it on the same EVM.

Re:Elegant

Why is it again that elections can only be held once every four years and every possible decision must be made at the same time? Elections aren't just held every four years. National elections are held every two years. Senators are elected for six year terms, and every two years, one-third of them have to run for office again. Members of the house serve two year terms. States can also have special elections, and many cities will have a number of referendums during the year. It's only when you have presidental elections that you have alot more intrest in voting.

Re:Elegant

You have to understand tho, the indian goverment isn't even halfway as ursurped as ours is. You'll notice that our goverment seems to think that if it isn't expensive, it isn't worth spending money on, especially if it isn't run by a buddy of someone in power. Not to mention the fact that Diebold is run by republicans, and there's proof of loss of votes. The only reason they're able to get away with it is, well, our country is falling apart and most of the media is owned by 6 corps, and within 10 years, 1 corp.

If the American people knew what their goverment has done to them, there'd be a civil war no doubt. Infact, as the middle class dissapears I think more and more people will begin asking pesky questions, and our gestapo FBI won't be able to handle it all.

Exploit

Print out an alternate list of candidates, with your opponent swapped with an unlikely candidate. Stick it to the front of the voting machine. Anyone with 3 seconds unsupervised access to the machine can pull this off, and it may go unnoticed if it otherwise looks exactly like the original.

Re:Exploit

With only 1500 votes cast per machine this would be a rather high risk / low reward way of cheating.. It is safe to assume that if it is worth switching the candidate (i.e. the candidate might win) the candidate would also be well known among the voters. So, chances are that at most a handful of voters would vote wrongly before it got discovered. (And then you might spend some quality time in an Indian prison! Who would want to miss that! ;)

The Indian system seems easy to verify, if the software is just a few hundred lines of assembly each major party can hire their own team who can verify the software. Try that with the Diebold system.. There would never be any elections at all then.

Of course, the central counting office might still be compromised, but it seems this is made hard by simply following the old way of counting paper ballots. (I.e. looking at each machine as a ballot box)

Re:Exploit

There would never be any elections at all then.
I think that's the point.

Re:Exploit

Yeah, sounds simple, but believe me when you've seen the number of party symbols and the number of languages, it doesn't seem that easy at all. Besides, making a copy of the list would be along similar lines of difficulty as counterfeiting currency. Once you've seen the lists, you'll know what I'm talking about :)

EVM Success

The Indian elections - all-electronic - a few hundred million voters seems to have gone off with few hitches. This does kind of validate EVMs.

For those with concerns about security, hacking, etc. there are possible solutions. A good, low cost, locked-down EVM can be deployed on a standard PC - running any OS - the UI needs to be only a radio-button-type list box, with a submit/cancel button, and a tracker for each entry in the list box. The Admin views can be kept on a separate machine, and downloaded into the actual EVM PC. Top-class encryption can be thrown in with no additional complexity. A basic reporting app can tabulate and display results. No network cards needed on the EVM

What other features would ensure better acceptance of EVMs?

India's setup is fantastic

Elections in India are generally marvellous exercises in democracy. In national elections, hundreds of millions of people of many different kinds cast their votes and elect their representatives. Many people doubted whether democracy would flourish in India, but they are proved wrong after every election. However, the fact still remains that there are still a lot of irregularities in the electoral process.

The bulk of the states have generally free and fair elections. The poorest states, especially those in the North, do not. There, the local strongmen actively use force to swing voted to their side and in a lot of constituencies it is not the most popular candidate who wins, but the most popular. In the poorest of the poor states, this fraud happens on a very large scale.

Today, vote rigging is a very simple exercise. All you have to do is get a bunch of very strong men with weapons of some kind and visit each polling station one by one, threaten the officers there and stamp the ballot papers in your favor. The more organized efforts include printing fake ballot papers and having them counted.

Now that EVMs have been introduced, the potential for localized fraud will be several restricted in some ways. Fake ballot papers cannot be printed, votes cannot be changed or removed. However, the local strong men and criminalized parties will still be around. They will still be able to threaten/cajole/buy people and subvert the democratic process. These problems are more systemic and will solve themselves with the passage of time.

Centralized election fraud is a very different matter. On paper, it looks like EVMs can take care of it. The results of "electronic" elections can be easily verified repeatedly and it should be somewhat difficult to systematically rig EVMS. I'm sure that people will find some way of manipulating EVMs, but it shouldn't knew the results much.

Finally, EVMs have delivered a lot of tangible results in India already. For example, results have been tabulated almost instantly, considerably shortening the political and economic uncertainty associated with elections. They definitely help democracy at every level in India.

Don't forget the paper trail...

Along with the use of EVM's in India, at every polling station, there are usually representatives of all parties and/or independent candidates besides the Election Commission's representatives, who have with them the voter list for that constituency.

Every voter has to produce a proof of identity. Upon verification, his/her name is called out, and all the representatives go through their individual paper lists, as well the EC representatives, and they mark that person has cast a vote.

After you cast the vote, an indelible ink mark is put against the fingernal of the index finger (or other fingers if you have any handicap), which takes a few days to dissolve and disappear.

The number of people that cast the ballot is then verified against the number of people who have been marked as "voted" in these individual paper lists at the end of the polling day.

On the final counting day, of course the EVM provides the actual votes cast, but the count of votes is re-verified against EC representative's list.

Re:Don't forget the paper trail...

After you cast the vote, an indelible ink mark is put against the fingernal of the index finger (or other fingers if you have any handicap), which takes a few days to dissolve and disappear.

This system allows someone to vote up to 10 times. All that has to be done is to remove the finger that has been marked, then they could cast the next vote as someone else. Repeat until out of markable parts. Please note this will only work for 1 election...

Upset?

"...and the result is an upset. As reported earlier, this election was conducted entirely through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs)."

I see no reason why using EVMs would necessarily result in an 'upset', unless of course they are using closed source voting machines in which no one can review the code to see there isn't any hanky panky.

Things that should be open source: voting machines, encryption programs, anonymous p2p applications, the majority of things dealing with security.

Fraudulent voting is still doable ...

as was discussed in this NYTimes from April 27 article [nytimes.com] (sorry, only abstract here, unless you're willing to pay). The Police were overwhelmed and the whole site was taken over by party workers, who then proceeded to push the button for their candidate again and again and again. The Times even had a photograph of it.

Read the article

There is a votes-per-hour limit on each machine, and a total-votes-per-polling-place limit of 1500 votes.

So even if you managed to capture the entire output of a polling place, you only affect 1500 votes maximum. With the votes-per-hour limit, you have to hold that polling place for hours to do even that.

Thats a lot of risk for a pretty uncertain and limited advantage.

Remote voting

Certainly a big advantage of electronic voting is seen as being able to vote remotely, over the internet or whatever (it's certainly been used in the UK for local council elections). The Indian system just seems like small non-networked computers at the polling stations as a replacement for boxes of paper. It's got big advantages for counting etc. but it doesn't do what a lot of people would want (secure internet voting).

Re:Remote voting

it doesn't do what a lot of people would want (secure internet voting).

Thank god. What's the point of internet voting? If someone can't be arsed to walk 100 yards to vote, why do we want to know what they think -- they probably don't. We have proxy and postal votes for people who really can't make it to a polling station.

in any case isn't `secure internet' a conradiction in terms?

Re:Remote voting

OK for townies. In the country people have to travel further.

OTOH, they presumably do so on a daily basis, so it just becomes `go 100 yards out of their way'.

There is a widely recycled assumption that we need to get more people to vote and/or `become involved in politics'. This seems to be to be amazingly stupid. We need to get more people to think about politics. The voting etc will come as a natural consequence. Getting them to vote without thinking first is just a way to reduce the average information content of an election.

Diebold system should have been...

outsourced to India!

Re:Diebold system should have been...

Better yet, lets outsource our candidates (heck even the voters) to India, certainly they can't pick a worse lot than we have been picking lately.

Re:Diebold system should have been...

"outsourced to India!"

Maybe it was. Does anyone know for sure who wrote the code?

FYI

Sonia Gandhi is in no way related to mahatma Gandhi. Jawaharlal Nehru was the first PM of India and his daughter , Indira , also a PM ,married a guy whose last name happened to be Gandhi.

Vajpayee Should Have...

...outsourced the handling of his campaign to American campaign experts, one of the few areas where we Americans still have a comparative advantage.

Hmm....

...it was a big surprise upset? In the US elections last fall when it happened, they're still saying that the upset was due to the machines being misprogrammed/miscalibrated/0wned.

Who really knows?

Blaster - This is damning, if true:

"Diebold system works on Microsoft software, it has no seals on locks and panels to detect a tempering. It has a keyboard interface (!!!) and the server was tested to have "Blaster" virus."

The claim is that a Diebold box was insecure enough to be wide open for use by any passing hacker via the back-door.

India own3d

The new Indian President, known only as "2K00l4Sk00l", in his first act of office has announced that the dating process will be replaced by a obfuscated C code competition.

He has also started construction of a massive sign extending right across the Indian sub-continent proclaiming "0wn3d" in large black lettering.

Not a fair comparision

Each machine has its own strengths and weaknesses based on various design goals. If you happen to be looking for fair and accurate voting tech, by all mean go with the Indian setups. Diebold's customers have different requirements is all.

Yes..

..these elections have been a landmark for the country, and not just because of the use of EVM's. EVM's had been used earlier for state elections, but this was the first general election in which they were used.

It also marks a shift in public opinion - the ruling party admits it miscalculated the public poll and did not do well with its India Shining campaign.

For a more insight into the surprises brought by the election, have a look at the pictures here [bbc.co.uk] [BBC] (among them, the EVM's being transported by elephants) :-)

About the new Indian PM

I'd just like to point out that the new Indian Prime Minister is Mrs Sonia Gandhi. BBC has a profile on her here [bbc.co.uk].

And while we're talking about Indian Election results, I would like to point out that she was an Italian citizen till 1983 when she obtained Indian citizenship - she's still a Roman Catholic - though she follows Hindu practices (for example during former PM Rajiv Gandhi's (her husband - no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) funeral).

In addition, India, a primarily/traditionally Hindu country has a Muslim president - Dr. Abdul Kalam - who's an all around great guy and a scientist/genius - and an open source advocate. RMS met him personally when in India.

I know I'm tottering a little OT, but I think it's something to be proud of, when a country and it's citizens can be secular/open-minded enough to ignore religious/cultural differences and choose their leader based on personal merit - moreover with today's world affairs.

Machine Pictures and More Information

Can be found here [bbc.co.uk] at the BBC.

Here's what's missing in the US:

Both systems are identical, and are developed to the specifications of Election Commission of India.

Is there any such commission in America? I get the impression that your voting system depends on which county you're in.

I saw Greg Palast [grepalast.com] in Berkeley a few weeks back and he was talking about the 'systems' in place in Florida. In one county if you spoiled your vote, the machine spat the ballot back at you and you got a fresh chance to vote. In another county, your ballot disappeared into a chute and if you spoiled your vote, you never knew about it. In the case of the former, the county was overwhelmingly white (and Republican-voting) while in the latter the county was overwhelmingly black (and Democrat-voting). But then invesitgative Journalists like Mr Palast are just 'conspiracy theorists,' aren't they?

Wow! They also make voting machines?

I actually worked with BEL many years ago. I worked for a company that developed this [bel-india.com] with BEL (we did the simulator part, they did everything else).

Election Upset + E-Voting = Suspicious

Ever since the Florida incident, whenever I hear of an election upset that invovled some method of e-Voting implemented somewhere in the system, I get suspicious ...

Just my $0.02 worth.

Re:Election Upset + E-Voting = Suspicious

It didn't make news at the time (and makes only a little news now), but e-voting was in fact used in Florida and there were signifigant irregularities with the machines. One district reported massive negative votes for Gore, for example (and although this was noticed and 'corrected', there is no way whatsoever to verify that the 'corrected' results were in fact correct). The hanging chads and whatnot weren't the ONLY election problems in Florida.

Casino Game Machine Engineers

Why aren't we purchasing our voting equipment in the US with the same rigid standards as casinos take to their games machines? I mean honestly, some of the stupidity taken with some of these (for instance the wifi access to an MDB file ...) is just ludicrous if you had offered the same level of "security" to a casino with their electronic poker machines they would have laughed you out the door.

Simplistic devices with a single input method and a disabled output method until the machine is closed out for voting. At that point only those responsible for the voting machines can even transfer the votes. On top of which a verified paper ballot is essential in any election with electronic devices.

Sadly the US populous is far less informed than the rest of the world. Most don't even care how big an upset the Indian election was, nor the fact that it is historic for it's electronic voting methods. I doubt this will have much of an impact on the Diebold hotbutton of the week.

Open and closed

I am not an Open Software fundamentalist, as I use interchangeably Windowns and Linux in the course of my work. But I always get to see the direct result of my actions, even when they don't occur in the exact same manner I intended them too (sometimes, it's just because I did it wrong :) )

But as far as software-only e-voting, how the hell can I trust my vote, of which I have no feedback, will be registered right by a system whose source-code I have no access to? In this case, I believe that OS is clearly the way... and I agree with the article on the need for simple solutions. Such a complicated architecture is bound to have errors!

But, I live in Portugal, where e-voting is still just not an issue :) It just scares me that elections in such an important country, as far as the world equilibrium is concerned, might have it's leadership stolen

Last elections in Liberia were won by a candidate which boasted a full 1500% votes. :))) Hope I never hear anything similar from that side of the Atlantic

Amazing.

In an address on national television Mr Vajpayee said he accepted the verdict and said it was a demonstration of India's strong democractic roots. "My party and alliance may have lost but India has won," he said.

This is amazing. Why can't our politicians act like this when they lose? Maybe I'll move to India. It's probably easier to get a job there anyway.

simplicity/reliability isn't Diebolds problem

It's just too hard to fix an election if the system is simple or reliable. It seems there is a need to keep voters confused and distracted, and this would fit perfectly with the Diebold design.

Tap tap tap. These Indians are crazy:

They build their own electronic voting machines, and outsource their prime ministers :)
Shouldn't it be the other way around? no wait.. Humm..
All said and done, we've just witnessed how a real democracy ought to operate its elections. No hanging or pregnant chads, or dimpled and pimpled ballots.. Importantly, a minority vote cannot decide the fate of a government and that of thousands of innocent people elsewhere in the world.
And most importantly, a robust, self-governed machinery that operates the elections, NOT county officials who can be influenced by the local political establishment (Florida, remember?). The election commission of India answers to nobody but the president who has luckily so far has been someone with little autocratic ambitions, and anyway there are constitutional safeguards against that. Election officials operating the poll booths are school teachers mostly from the neighborhood, meaning that they'd likely know you by name anyway. I remember seeing my primary school teacher ticking off my name at the poll booth, just as she used to do in the classroom when I was younger.
Talk about first-world and third-world democracies ;)

Caste Your Vote! Grab Some Cash!

Just about every US citizen is familiar with (or at least has seen) an ATM. Financial transactions require amazing amounts of trust and security, yet the technology seems to work just fine in locations from bank lobbies to the mini-atm's w/ 300bps modems in shady convenience stores.

Why can't we cannibalize ATM technology for voting?

Features:

reciept printer for hard copies

speaker and braille for the visually impaired

simple interface

card reader/PIN entry to identify the voter

cash slot to reward you for for voting for the correct candidate ;)

So, voter walks up, inserts card & enters pin, voter interacts with candidate selection screen (maybe a slightly larger display than an ATM with up/dn arrows and a select key) - Hell, maybe when choosing a candidate, a blurb about that candidate's platform could be shown on-screen (for that last minute campaigning and public education), but IIRC that's against US voting rules...

And while we're at it, why not issue a freakin smart-card based Social Security Card to use with these machines - I'd gladly replace this blue piece of paper with an ancient version of my signature and seemingly typewritten SSN with something more durable like a credit card!

amount of paper saved

One also should not fail to notice the amount of paper and trees saved by india's shift to the electronic voting machines.

Batteries

In India, the demand for power far exceeds the capacity for generation. At any given time, a many districts are experiencing a complete power cut, though this is properly distributed so that no town goes without power for more than a few hours each week. I guess it would not be possible to have uninterrupted supply from morning to evening in all places going to polls on a particular day.
Sometimes if any generating station is overloaded, the entire regional distribution grid collapses, plunging a quarter of the country into darkness, and this happens every few months and needs hours to resolve. Currently the only city in the country which can disconnect itself smoothly from the grid is Bombay, and that is the only place where you can bank on electricity.
Also, the system uses simple box-type EVMs which are more like calculators than computers! There is no networking - every machine is tallied separately on a particular day at the district headquarters. So batteries are really the more sensible and reliable option. And as somebody mentioned elephants, portability is not a problem :)

Thought

I think a small change will help to make rigging more difficult - The order of the listing of the candidates should be changed after every vote is casted. This will make it more difficult to rig false votes.

Some comparisons weren't right

Comparing who purchases the systems has nothing to do with Diebold - that has to do with the national system for handling voting. In the U.S. (irrespective of the company producing the machines), each country handles their voting methods somewhat independently within the bounds of state and federal law. Thus several counties were on contracts with Diebold, but the state could over-ride those.

I'd also like to know where the author gets the idea that illiterate Americans don't get to vote. (Or maybe that was not what he was implying when he mentioned that illiterate Indians use thumbprints rather than signatures.)

Finally, I don't know about other areas, but my polling station is five blocks away from my house. If I wanted to use the one near my work, it wouldn't be that hard to change either. Most difficulty I've heard of comes when people forget to change their voter registration information when they move.

I don't know that Americans would be willing to have their finger stained for two weeks to ensure less chance of fraudulent votes. Of course, with only about half the eligible citizens voting, it could be worn as a badge of honor.

What about people with disabilities? Quick story.

One thing that really bothered me was the statement in the article that blind people could just take someone in with them to help cast their ballot.

Sure. This works. And it's what was done in most American polling places until the advent of the electric machine.

We have a large blind community at the polling place where I usually work - and I asked one how the new machines worked. She was practically in tears because she was so excited - she had just cast a vote by herself for the first time in her life (and she wasn't no spring chicken).

I realize in the scheme of creating a fair election system, this may seem like a minor point, but it certainly wasn't to her or anyone who talked with her and cares about the human dimension of democracy. Just a quick thought :)

It's often more complex than that

Elections in America rarely involve voting for one candidate over others for one office. You can have president, senator, congressman, governor, state senator, state representative, mayor, sheriff, district attorney, judge, and other people to vote for. Plus, there are the various states that have the initiative process, in which the voter votes for certain issues including state constitutional amendments.

You need a more complex machine for all that.

But your process has some good ideas. For us, maybe the following: Have some kiosks with touchscreens that all plug directly into a box like in the India method. This box will have a small server and a 16-port ethernet switch all within it, plus a small built-in touchscreen on top. When a kiosk is plugged-in, press a button to validate on the server. Then press a voting start button. When someone comes in, activate a machine for voting on the server like in the India method. Voter punches buttons and gets a paper receipt with a transaction SN. When all's done, press the "voting complete" button on the server, which will close off all ports, encrypt and sign all results and shut down, unable to restart without a key.

The state elections office will have the boot key and the key to decrypt the results and check the signature.

All OSS of course.

As simple... but no simpler

I find this to be a well written article, especially for non-Indians who want to understand India's country-wide voting stations. The other likes India's EVMs, with some justification, I think, despite the absence of paper ballot.

However, India's EVMs are not really applicable to a US context. While the idea promoted of "make it as simple as possible" is a good one (violated by Diebold in many ways), the author seems to forget the "but no simpler" corollary. The design of the Open Voting Consortium's system (see http://openvoting.org [openvoting.org] and http://evm2003.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]) strikes the correct compromise.

In fairness, in an Indian context, the idea of having elections with dozens of different races, each with a dozen candidates, plus a bunch of initiatives, might seem strange. But that's what we have in some US jurisdictions. Some US cities have even begun to use ranked preference voting (so far, usually scored as IRV, but maybe Condercet, Burda, Weighted, etc. someday).

The requirements for casting one vote for one MP are rather simple, and India's EVMs add no extra complexity to that.

Ironic

So now we've outsourced the frontiers of democracy, too...

No. Never. Absolutely not.

More information is also available at the equipment manufacturer's website.

To put it in technical terms, there's not a chance in hell anything on the equipment manufacturer's website after a scandal like this can be called "information", even when stretching the definition of the word until it hurts.

If you want information about a product, you can't trust the vendor. End of story, unfortunately.

zerg

Question: if we suspect something is amiss, all evidence points to something being amiss, and investigations prove that something is amiss, are we still being "paranoid"?

Is the problem worth solving?

Think about if the problem really needs to be solved. As I see it the only benifit you get from having an electronic voting system, is that it gets counted faster.

The current electoral system (in ireland anyway) is paper base. (But not for long I suspect. Tests with electronic voting were carried out at the last election.) While it takes a while to count there is no doubt about the validity of your vote. You could, if you wanted to, sit and watch the box that your vote went into until it made it to the counting station. Then examine the seal to see if it was tampered and watch as its counted.

An electronic vote disappears into the mystic void and who knows what happens. You may have some hope of finding out with the indian EVM as its in assembly and fairly short. If your in the USA good luck figuring out all that crap (WinCE, MsSQL server...).

Without electronic voting, the Indian election would have taken months to count I assume. 1 billion voters is a lot so perhaps an electronic method is needed. But in most european countries those problems don't exist.

There is no problem so don't try and fix it.

Re:Obviously there's something wrong with them

Sonia Gandhi is not related to Mahatma Gandhi(Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of Independent India had a daughter, Indira Priyadarshini Nehru who married Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi(Iranian)and took his name. Sonia Gandhi is the daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi.

Interestingly, Feroze Gandhi's name was originally spelt Ghandy or Ghandi - this may have been changed to play on the allusion to Mahatma Gandhi.

There is a great book "The Nehrus and the Gandhis" [litencyc.com]that has interesting information on the dynasty. A bit out-of date as it does not refer to the new generation - Rahual, Priyanka and Varun Gandhi

Re:Oops!

I dont understand why everyone keeps calling this an "upset". We all know what a farce these exit polls are. Even Vajpai expected [indiatimes.com] defeat in these elections.

Re:Electric?

Why is running off of alkaline batteries supposed to be a good thing? I mean, these things do need to work all day, do they not?

Re:Electric?

They meant a mains outlet.

Re:Electric?

You are correct sir....Batteries DO NOT PRODUCE electricty. Which is what you questioned. They infact discharge a stored charge, but they do not produce it. If only they did.

Re:America bashing poll options:

Diebold suxx0rs, Dubya shoulda lost!
Diebold does indeed suxx0rs. Even if you ignore their obvious bias in favor of the Republicans, their code is bad; it runs on Windows, and transmits results over a network. All of those are insecure. Dubya should have lost, but Al Gore ran a pretty bad campaign.

America sucks!
As any physicist can tell you, nothing sucks. Things can only pull (with gravity) or push (with pressure). Sucking is just a function of creating a low pressure zone. Higher pressure moves to fill it, and can move things that get in its way.

India is great, they have a Communist party!
So do we. But in India they have a possibility of winning, which does make them better. Two party systems produce very poor results. People vote for one candidate because they hate the other guy, rather than because they love their candidate. Creating more options stops this and allows people to voice their opinions. Eliminating winner-takes-all elections is a good way to do this. I'm sure there are some republicans out there who don't want to be associated with the Theo-cons.

India is great, they are poorer than we are!
That didn't make any sense. If you are intimating that "unpatriotic" Americans want everyone to be poor, you're wrong. Actually, I would like to see a minimum wage in India, larger union activity, and better programs to help the poor and the environment in India. This would bring the poverty level down and increase upward mobility in the nation, which is good for their economy.

America is proud, they deserve to have egg in their face!
We already have egg on our face. We deserve it for electing Bush and not stopping his revenge/oil/Freedom (as in beer) war. Disagree? Great, that's what being American is about.

America is too successful, they need to be taught a lesson!
And how will having massive voter fraud teach America a lesson about being successful? By saying that Diebold hacking their own system so Bush can win again would be a lesson to not be so successful, you are admitting that Bush's economic policies are void.(Bush's plans don't work, therefore if he gets reelected it would be bad for the economy, therefore we would be taught a lesson about being successful.)

Whatever, I still want my tinfoil hat!
There's a difference between paranoia and questioning of a corporation who have been shown to be biased and produce poor-quality goods. I don't want Diebold casting my votes. If I knew they were going to be used in my district, I would vote by absentee ballot.

The system that India uses is very similar to the one used in my district. It's customizable for every election, has a simple interface, and is very tamper-proof. We don't need networked voting machines when I've been using this kind of equipment since I could vote.

Re:Obviously there's something wrong with them

Hey, John Ashcroft lost an election to a dead guy in Missouri, too!

Re:eVoting stock spam

americans tend to vote against candidates they don't want rather that for the candidates they want. This mentality tends to shut out alternative voting such as green party, libertarian or independants

The problem is not with the voters. It's with the election. The system of single plurality (one vote, one candidate), is mathematically a very unfair, almost undemocratic way to run an election whenever there are 3 or more candidates. Using a better system like instant runoff or one of the many others would enable people to vote for their favorite candidate, without helping their least favorite to win by doing so. But until then, Republicans will love the Green party.

The Indian EVM machine appears to use the same single plurality vote, supporting up to 16 candidates. If someone wants to win, they'll convince a dozen other candidates with the same beliefs as their opponents to run and fill up the rest of the candidate list. The results may be quite accurate, but who knows if the winner was really who the voters wanted?

Re:nyt on voter fraud in India

Yes it happend & guess what those EVM's will be torched & people are asked to vote again in those affected places with different once.
This time there will be so much security that even the thought of repeating the same fraudulent voting pattern, would land you in serious problem. And remember earlier elections, this stuff used to more wide spread.

Re:no sore losers?

I hope we don't get Gore ][ when Kerry loses in November.

If people incapable of critical thought ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H republicans don't want to see a Gore ][ in November, then they should stop stealing elections from the American electorate, shredding the constitution, ignoring the bill of rights, disparaging the UN, violating the Geneva convention, starting wars under false pretenses, intimidating the news media into offering only subdued criticism of these practices, and otherwise behaving like the party that, in contrast to the Republicans in 2000, actually won the elections in Germany ... circa 1939.

Re:no sore losers?

Yes there are sore losers. A government minister in the southern state of Tamil nadu has complained that votes were stolen by a remove control. See this story in Indian express [expressindia.com]