Is EVM hacking possible?

Elections results are out and BJP has made a tremendous victory in UP and Uttrakhand. But the opposite party has taken out new excuse to mark their existence. EVM HACKED! Is it so?

Earlier we use to make use of ballot paper for casting vote but as the population of India increased counting in the tradition way became difficult. Here came the need of EVM. EVM was first used by Kerala in 1982 at some polling booth and after 2004 EVM was mainstream. EVM machines are manufacture at 2 places in India, first is Bharat Electronic Limited located in Bangalore and second is Electronic Corporation India limited which is located in Hyderabad.

Both of them produce exactly same machine comprising of two part, first is balloting unit which is in front of voter at the time of vote and other  is at the operator end who give command to cast a new vote. EVM machine can hold 16 different parties name and we can maximum connect 4 machines in parallel making the total count of 64 different parties. After all votes are cast, these machines are sealed and finally open at the time of counting.

It seems like that it is tempers prove but still there are some loopholes. There are 2 ways to hack it, first is by changing the display with new display embedded with Bluetooth so that we can alter the screen count through Bluetooth device and other is to directly rewrite memory but as these machines have no ports, therefore for the purpose of rewriting memory you have to open machine. However, both the ways require physical presence of machine with you and imagine manipulating thousands such machines will take how much time.

Now, do you think were the EVM hacked?

Election commission is planning a new system known as Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail where voter can see to whom they have cast vote by checking the confirmation receipt and later on this paper can be used as audit. It was used at 8 places in 2014 election and expected to use everywhere in 2019 election.