Can the vote be rigged? Ahead of India election, old debate gets new life

Opposition parties have questioned the reliability of electronic voting machines. But transparency experts say any manipulation happens before the vote.

New Delhi, India – As he launched the main Indian opposition alliance’s election campaign in the middle of March, Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi hit out at two targets: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he described as the “king”, and the electronic voting machines (EVMs) that the country uses to cast ballots.

“The soul of the king is in the EVM,” Gandhi said in Mumbai.

The allegation: that the machines can be hacked, and that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) owes its electoral dominance over India to that malpractice, even though multiple opinion polls suggest the prime minister’s party is resoundingly the favourite among voters in many parts of the country.

The charge isn’t new. The Congress and some other opposition parties have previously too questioned the trustworthiness of EVMs, machines that are not connected to the internet yet run on chips that critics say could, in theory, be programmed to record votes in a way that doesn’t match the buttons that voters press.

The Election Commission of India (ECI), which conducts the country’s votes, and even the Supreme Court, have rubbished these allegations and no conclusive evidence has emerged yet to substantiate the claims.

But as India now heads for national elections over seven drawn-out phases starting April 19, Gandhi has made the possibility of election fraud a central talking point. The Congress leader, who has been on a long march, is demanding that India return to the paper ballots it used in elections until the late 1990s, which were counted manually.

That demand was rejected last week by the Supreme