A city-based technology company, NetIndia, which commissioned a collaborative study on the possibility of tampering with the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), has claimed that the EVMs were ‘vulnerable to fraud’.
In a press release on Wednesday, the company maintained that its research proved that ‘even brief access to the machines [EVMs] could allow criminals to alter election results”. The research study was done by Hari Prasad, Managing Director of NetIndia in collaboration with Rop Gonggrijp, a security researcher from Netherlands and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan in the US.
In a video released today on its website ( >http://IndiaEVM.org ), the researchers show two demonstration attacks against a “real” Indian EVM.
One attack involves replacing a small part of the machine with a look-alike component that can be silently instructed to steal a percentage of votes polled in favour of a chosen candidate. These instructions, the company claimed, can be sent wirelessly from a mobile phone. The other attack uses a pocket-sized device to change the votes stored in the EVM between the election and the public counting session.
