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International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting

E-Vote-ID 2019: Electronic Voting pp 150–165Cite as

Auditing Indian Elections

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11759))

Abstract

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) used in the 2019 General Elections in India were fitted with printers to produce Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs). VVPATs allow voters to check whether their votes were recorded as they intended. However, confidence in election results requires more: VVPATs must be preserved inviolate and then actually used to check the reported election result in a trustworthy way that the public can verify. A full manual tally from the VVPATs could be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; moreover, it is difficult for the public to determine whether a full hand count was conducted accurately. We show how Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs) can provide high confidence in Indian election results. Compared to full hand recounts, RLAs typically require manually inspecting far fewer VVPATs when the outcome is correct, and are much easier for the electorate to observe in adequate detail to determine whether the result is trustworthy.

We show how to apply two RLA strategies, ballot-level comparison and ballot polling, to General Elections in India. Our main result is a novel method for combining RLAs in constituencies to obtain an RLA of the overall parliamentary election result.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://indianexpress.com/article/india/ec-to-tally-paper-trail-slips-with-evms-in-5-pc-booths-in-each-assembly-seat-4737936/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Vote/ballotPollTools.htm.

  3. 3.

    https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Vote/auditTools.htm.

  4. 4.

    Sequentially valid means that the chance that the infimum of the P-value over all sample sizes is less than or equal to \(\alpha \) is itself less than or equal to \(\alpha \) if the null hypothesis is true. In contrast, standard hypothesis tests are designed for sample sizes that are fixed ahead of time: expanding the sample and re-calculating the P-value for such tests generally produces type I error rates far larger than the nominal significance level, because it does not account for multiplicity.

  5. 5.

    Prof. Sandeep Shukla of IIT Kanpur has pointed out that the current Indian VVPAT design does not protect against the EVM adding electronic votes and corresponding VVPATs when voters are not looking, because there is no publicly observable mechanism to ensure that at most one VVPAT is inserted into the box per voter. This needs to be addressed by improving the physical design in a way that is beyond the scope of this paper.

  6. 6.

    Indian EVMs (as far as we know) do not produce blank votes. However, if they did they could be accommodated easily. A 1-vote overstatement occurs if we find a blank vote in the reported winner’s pile. A neutral error would occur when there were at least three candidates and we found a blank vote in a reported loser’s pile. A one-vote understatement would occur when there were exactly two candidates and we found a blank vote in the reported loser’s pile.

  7. 7.

    There are other ballot-polling methods that do not use the reported results at all.

  8. 8.

    See for example https://github.com/pbstark/S157F17/blob/master/kaplanWald.ipynb and https://github.com/pbstark/S157F17/blob/master/pSPRTnoReplace-ment.ipynb.

  9. 9.

    See, e.g., [9].

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Andrew Conway, Archanaa Krishnan, Chittaranjan Mandal, Sandeep Shukla, Nicholas Akinyokun, Peter Stuckey and Poorvi Vora for valuable suggestions on this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India

    Vishal Mohanty

  2. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Chris Culnane & Vanessa Teague

  3. University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

    Philip B. Stark

Authors
  1. Vishal Mohanty
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  2. Chris Culnane
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  3. Philip B. Stark
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  4. Vanessa Teague
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Vishal Mohanty , Chris Culnane , Philip B. Stark or Vanessa Teague .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Robert Krimmer

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Melanie Volkamer

  3. Equipe Cassis, Bat A, LORIA, Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France

    Veronique Cortier

  4. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Bernhard Beckert

  5. University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Ralf Küsters

  6. Zentrum für Demokratie Aarau ZDA, Aarau, Switzerland

    Uwe Serdült

  7. Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    David Duenas-Cid

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Mohanty, V., Culnane, C., Stark, P.B., Teague, V. (2019). Auditing Indian Elections. In: Krimmer, R., et al. Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11759. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30625-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30625-0_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30624-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30625-0

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