Dear Supreme Court :
A few days ago , you
delivered the verdict saying 100 % VVPAT verification is neither feasible, nor
necessary
Simultaneously, you asked
the Central Government / Election Commission to explore the possibility of a “
Electronic Machine based 100 % verification “ , which I had suggested in my
above mentioned email of 2019 – as also in :
Ø Votes
Audit : Paper gives 99.9936% / Electronic gives 100 % .. 18 March 2024
From the
following write-up about Ballot Verifier tool , you will be convinced that the proposals given by
me are not only totally FEASIBLE but far superior to the Ballot
Verifier
I am taking the liberty of
sending this blog ( as email ) to our Chief Election Commissioner ( cec@eci.gov.in )
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.HemenParekh.ai / 09
May 2024
===================================================
Sound from India ( 2019 ) :
I sent following e-mail to
our Cabinet Ministers / Chief Ministers / NITI Aayog :
Ø 100
% verification of VVPAT ? No problem ! ………….. 02 Apr 2019
Extract :
Now, it is too
late for the upcoming elections within the next few days , but I urge EC to consider
following suggestion for the next election ( even the very next State Election ) :
Just above the
EVM , mount a CCTV camera , which is connected with the EVM and gets actuated
as soon as the voter presses any button on the EVM
Using “ Close
Up / Zoom In “ , the camera will capture a very sharp and focussed image of the
paper slip which is below the glass panel and displays following details :
# Candidate
Serial Number
# Candidate
Name
# Candidate’s
photo
Using Image Processing
Software ,
This IMAGE will get
converted into TEXT,
- and
Get added to
“ Verification
Database of EVM # ABC “
[ - with the
latest Facial Recognition technology available commercially, this will
pose no problem ]
Each IMAGE –
and its corresponding TEXT will carry a “ System Time Stamp “
When voting at
a booth gets over at the end of the day , this entire database is tallied with the
number of votes registered
That 100 %
verification , would take a few seconds !
That “ 100 % Electronic
Audit Tally [ EAT ], will be immediately shown to the representatives
of all the Political parties who are authorized by the EC to remain present
inside the booth
And they will
be required to sign a EAT declaration , confirming
the results shown to them
No more arguments
/ disputes !
Dear Shri Sunil
Aroraji,
If you have any
doubt re the feasibility of my suggestion, I request you to contact the
manufacturers of the EVMs / CCTVs / TCS / Infosys / Wipro / L&T Infotech etc
This email is
sent to :
Echo from America ( 2024 ) :
Ø
The
Answer to Election Deniers Is in an Idaho County Website … 07 May 2024
Extract :
Tom O’Donnell had never really been that
interested in how elections worked until former president Donald Trump lost in
2020. Then, everything changed.
Like hundreds of thousands of people across
the US, O’Donnell joined so-called election integrity groups that posted baseless
conspiracies about the 2020 election. His group was called Idaho First Audit, and members flooded election
offices across the state with requests for voting data.
They weren’t alone: Other organizations like right-wing activist group True
the Vote inundated election offices across the country as part
of a broader effort they believed would uncover systemic fraud within
the election process.
Election workers in Ada County, Idaho, home to the state
capital of Boise, were pretty amenable to questions about the election process
from O’Donnell’s group. O’Donnell even organized a tour of the Ada County
election offices “to learn more about the process of voting,” and struck up a
relationship with Trent Tripple, then the deputy county clerk.
But Tripple, who became county clerk last
year, was one of the
officials struggling to cope with the barrage of records
requests and threats that
the majority of election offices were receiving at the time. After the records
requests overwhelmed the election office’s employees, Tripple and Ada County’s
director of election, Saul Seyler, decided they needed to change things up.
So after years of work, they’ve now given
election deniers exactly what they’ve been asking for: Last week, Tripple and
Seyler launched Ballot
Verifier, a first-of-its-kind tool that gives anyone with an internet connection direct
access to every single ballot that has been cast in all Ada County elections
since 2022, meaning that those
in the election denial movement can no longer say that they don’t have access
to the information they want.
“We just decided there’s got to be a way
that we can push back against this a little bit but also achieve that perfect marriage between technology and
government records so that citizens, candidates, parties, everybody has access
to all the information that we have,” says Tripple.
The tool provides sleek graphics of all
election races, and allows users to filter by type of ballot and even drill
right down to precinct level to see an image of every single one of the ballots counted.
Crucially,
the ballot images are presented alongside what is known as the cast vote
record, which is the record of how the ballot tallying machine counted the vote
on election day.
By
showing these side-by-side, anyone can instantly see whether there are any
discrepancies.
“I can’t even dream up how we can be more transparent than this,” says Tripple. “There isn’t anything else that we have that the
public cannot see.”
Ballot images and cast vote records, both details
about elections barely ever mentioned prior to 2020, have become a
focus for election conspiracists trying to prove widespread voter fraud conspiracies.
In some cases, election conspiracists have
even built programs to
look at ballot images. Well-funded groups like True the Vote have
built online tools based on voter rolls, previously
reported on by WIRED, which they are urging their tens of thousands
of supporters to use and then erroneously claim voters should be struck off the
voter rolls.
“It's very different if [an online tool] is
coming from an independent group, like True the Vote, that obviously has
certain political leanings, and information that they're providing is through a
lens,” says Seyler, as opposed to “something like [ Ballot Verifier ], which is available to everybody and truly
transparent.”
The data, the team says, is also private. “There is nothing that is printed
on this ballot other than the individual markings, [nothing] that would tie it
to a particular voter,” says Tripple. “The ballot is completely private.”
Still, some election experts have voiced
concerns about the potential for systems like Ballot Verifier to pose
privacy risks for voters, particularly in small precincts or in cases where
voters leave notes on the ballots that could identify them.
“Despite the clear benefits to transparency of releasing cast vote records and
ballot images, making these
records public comes with trade-offs,” researchers from the Bipartisan Policy
Center wrote
in August. “Voters’ privacy might be compromised, and vote buying
becomes feasible when ballot secrecy is violated—an extreme, if less likely,
potential ramification of making ballot images public.”
There have also been some prior efforts to give voters access to ballot images, such
as in Pueblo County in Colorado in 2021, but these efforts were not
as comprehensive or technically proficient as Ballot Verifier.
At the same time that Tripple and Seyler
were trying to think about a better solution, Idaho had been using a tool
called ElectionStats to give voters access to statistics around election results. That
tool was created by Civera Software, a civic technology company that ended up
working alongside Ada County election officials to build out the new Ballot
Verifier tool.
And even before the system went live,
Tripple invited O’Donnell and other skeptics to be among the first to test it
out.
“I think it's really good. It's more than I
thought would have happened, because when we request our images now, we just
get a data dump of files,” O’Donnell tells WIRED, adding that the Telegram
group has responded positively to the launch of Ballot Verifier.
WIRED also tested the Ballot Verifier
tool, looking at specific precincts and races, filtering votes by type (mail-in
ballot, absentee ballot, etc.) and found that the system worked smoothly and instantly displayed images of every ballot
cast.
US elections have never been safer, and the
2020 election was declared
the “most secure” by Trump’s own officials. But a lot of people
still believe unfounded conspiracies about elections, and the roll out of this
tool in one county in one state is not necessarily going to change that
overnight. Indeed, a review of O’Donnell’s 400-person Telegram channel by WIRED
this week shows that many within the election integrity group are still
regularly sharing widely debunked conspiracies about voting.
Adam Friedman, Civera’s founder, believes
part of the reason for this is a lack of transparency, something which Ballot
Verifier can address.
“A lot of the conspiracy theories and
divisiveness and toxic rhetoric and mistrust around elections in America goes
hand-in-hand with people not
being able to see enough and people perceiving voting as being a black box experience,” says Friedman. “Ballot Verifier is really a way to turn
a black box into a glass box.”
Friedman says that Civera had already signed
a contract with several counties in Texas to provide the tool to them, and was
in discussions with counties in multiple other states. The tool is also of
interest to academics, and Friedman says the company is in preliminary
conversations with two prominent universities and a number of political
scientists who study cast vote records.
But Ballot Verifier is not cheap. Friedman and Civera provided a “large discount” on the research and
development costs for this tool, but it still cost Ada County $ 40,000. While there are
no current plans to roll the tool out nationally, Seyler says that while every
county could benefit from using a system like it, election
budgets have been historically underfunded. While all the backend
work to upload new election data is handled by the company’s employees, the
company is also currently building tools to allow local election officials to
do this themselves, and go even faster.
The next big test for the Ballot Verifier
tool comes later this month with the state-wide primaries in Idaho on May 21. This will be the first time the officials will
be working with recent election data rather than historical data, and they know there will be pressure to get
that information online as soon as possible. Seyler says the current
projection for getting the data uploaded is four to six weeks, though it
could be quicker if Civera can finish some additional tools they are working on
to improve efficiencies.
Looking further ahead, Tripple even foresees
a point when data is
available in Ballot Verifier so quickly after a vote that it could be used by
candidates or parties to decide whether a recount is necessary, potentially
avoiding the expensive and drawn-out recount process.
“That's not going to be possible now because
of the speed at which we're uploading this data, but I think that's something
that could be happening in the future,” says Tripple.