Finally some one had the industriousness to come up with a detailed study of Electronic voting machines in India. U can see it here - there is a link to a free download of the book. Some shocking excerpts from the study
The EVM manufacturers, namely BEL and ECIL have shared the "top secret" software programming code used in the electronic voting machines with foreign manufacturers (Microchip, U.S.A and Renesas, Japan) to have it fused (copied) onto the microprocessors. These chips are then delivered to BEL and ECIL through their local vendors as 'masked' microchips (in case of ECIL) or 'One Time Programmable-Read Only Memory (OTP-ROM)' microchips (in case of BEL).
As the microchips delivered to the manufacturers are 'masked' or 'OTP-ROM', when the microchips are delivered, the EVM manufacturers have no facility to read back the contents in the microchips to establish whether the microchips supplied to them have the original software or not. Shocking, isnt it?
Curiously, BEL and ECIL could have done the 'fusing' of the software onto microcontrollers in their own premises in a secure manner. That being the case, why did they prefer to do this in a foreign country? At whose instance was this decision taken and what were the compelling reasons for taking the decision? Despite repeated queries, there are no answers forthcoming from the Election Commission to any of these questions. There are several decisions taken by the Election Commission which are questionable. First, the Election Commission has used as many as 9.3 lakh old electronic voting machines in 2009 parliamentary elections, ignoring the recommendations of its own Expert Committee. Only 4.48 lakh voting machines (about one third of all EVMs used) are new or upgraded machines and meet the specifications suggested by the Expert Committee. The old EVMs - whose dubious nature didnt have the fullest sanction of the expert committee - its easy to tamper them - were used in congress ruled states.
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