India's electronic voting machines are vulnerable to attack

ns.umich.edu

21 points·wglb··7 comments

The point is whether they are less secure than paper ballots. Is it more trivial to tamper with these machines change/destroy valid paper ballots in a similar situation. I think the machines are put in a secure location when they are being use and the time between election and counting

"the time between election and counting" - This is of course quite critical , from what i know of India, in certain parts of the country - ballot stuffing of paper ballots was very prevalent. EVM's at least preclude that possibility.

No, they don't. The clip-on attack can electronically stuff the EVM by rewriting the internal EEPROM, bypassing the EVMs' rate-limiting feature.

Some ideas on how technology can be used to enhance the security and accuracy of elections:

http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-v...

Rop Gonggrijp: "We also made it lie about election results"

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0802/msg0002...

"Such machines have already been abandoned in Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Florida and many other places. India should follow suit,".

Interesting. Was this known pre-election in 2009 ?

There are citations for each of those abandonments in the paper:

Ireland: announced April 2009

California: around 2007

Florida: also 2007ish

the Netherlands: 2008

Germany: March 2009

So, it looks like the answer to your question is "in some cases".

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