Tulsi Gabbard rejects American EVM; Indian opposition, media get unduly excited

A 31-second clip of apparently a longer speech, where United States' Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard criticised the electronic voting machines that several countries in the West have tested and rejected, saw the Indian opposition and media excited about the 'vulnerability' of the Indian vote counting machines. Handles with large followings, like India With Congress (@UWCforYouth) posted the video on X, casting doubts over the Indian EVM.

🚨 EVMs Are Hackable!!!
Global Concern, Indian Denial!

Former US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard exposes shocking vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting Machines (#EVM), demanding a return to Paper Ballots for free & fair elections.

She revealed in a Cabinet meeting that her office… pic.twitter.com/ebaFH1cOsW

— India With Congress (@UWCforYouth) April 11, 2025

The Indian National Congress's Harmeet Kaur K, Aditya Goswami, Ankit Mayank, etc. Among many who retweeted the first post cited above were Rajasthan Congress's state coordinator of social media Imtiyaz Ali and the Indian Women's Congress of Gujarat, Delhi and Punjab.

CNN, NBC News, The Economic Times, ABP News, Firstpost, etc, have run the story.

Why the Congress would be excited about the alleged hack-prone nature of EVMs is understandable. Since a majority of elections in India have been won by their archrival BJP since 2014, in between several victories of the INC too, it pays politically to cast aspersions on the EVM. The question is whether the media believes rigging an Indian election by hacking EVMs is possible and whether such a thing ever happened in the country.

A journalist shouldn't believe the conspiracy theory because Bharat Electronics Limited, which manufactures India's EVM, and the Election Commission of India have addressed the misgivings.

A school of thought in journalism is that pro-opposition journalism is always preferable to pro-government journalism, whatever the truth of a given story. Perhaps driven by that, many journalists often remind the people that even the BJP's top leader of yesteryears, LK Advani, had doubted the veracity of the EVM.

What they suppress is the fact that Mayawati did so too. However, once the EC and BEL convinced them that Indian elections couldn't be rigged by hacking EVMs, they never repeated their allegation.

Facts about the Indian EVM

1. Unlike the models tested in advanced economies and democracies in the West, Indian EVMs are standalone units. They are not connected via the Internet.
2. An Indian EVM has a write-once-read-many (WORM) memory; it's a data storage device in which information, once written, cannot be modified. In other words, an Indian EVM is like a calculator, while the American counterpart, whose flaws were demonstrated in hackathons, was a computer.
3. Sure, any machine in the world can be hacked, and an Indian EVM is no exception (a few Indian geeks demonstrated it after stealing one unit each). However, due to (1) and (2) above, rigging an Indian election would involve tampering with lakhs of machines individually. It's not like you hack one machine, and the entire election goes in your favour — as demonstrated twice in the US and once in the Netherlands, after which they decided not to use machines for counting votes.

The scale of theft has to be massive, and no case of missing or unguarded EVMs reported so far is so big that it could have altered the result. At the rate of 2,000 votes per EVM unit, you cannot alter the result of a constituency that has 17 lakh 86 thousand 372 voters on average (97 crore total voters in India as of 2019 divided by 543 Lok Sabha seats — data from an article I had written three years ago).

A few detractors, who wanted to demean Indian democracy, demonstrated how an EVM can be hacked by using American and European machines that were interconnected to make the process of counting faster. They forgot to take into account the fact that the EC had decided right in the beginning that only the voting needed to be faster and not the process of counting as well; they never connected one EVM unit to another since the inception of EVMs in the country. This is why, despite the use of machines, it takes more than the day of the results to come out with the final score — we get to know which party won how many of the 543 seats normally in about 36 hours, with the process beginning at 8 AM one day and ending post-noon the next day.