Opinion: Elon Musk is right on EVM hacking and so are those saying Indian EVMs cannot be hacked (2024)

New Delhi,UPDATED: Jun 18, 2024 19:15 IST

Every six months or so, or whenever there are elections in India, EVM hacking becomes the talk of the town. This time around, just days after our General Elections have concluded, it has become the talk of not just the town but the entire world. Thanks to Elon Musk. Last week, with an eye on the upcoming US elections and probably with not a single thought related to India, Musk tweeted, "We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high." And then he doubled down in another tweet, saying, "Anything can be hacked.”

Little did Musk know that whenever, and in whichever corner of the world, someone says the words EVM and hacking, it immediately makes millions of Indians sit upright, grab their keyboards and start hammering.

And hammering Indians did, with hundreds of thousands quote tweeting Musk and smugly channeling their inner I-told-you-so persona. One among these was Rahul Gandhi, who quoted Musk and tweeted, "EVMs in India are a black box, and nobody is allowed to scrutinise them." But where there is one group, it's obvious that the other one too would swarm. Thousands of Indians also took to their keyboards and slammed Musk, telling him how wrong he was. One of these was former IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar who said a lot of things in response to Musk, including this bit: "I think he is factually incorrect in saying that anything can be hacked. A calculator or toaster cannot be hacked.”

So, who is right and who is wrong? The truth, as it often happens, lies somewhere in the middle, in that nuanced space which one cannot find in the black and white world of Twitter feuds. But before I talk of that, let me deal with calculators. Yes, calculators.

Calculators, or at least some of them, can indeed be hacked. Between 2000 and 2015, there was even a group of people who were actively hacking calculators and having fun at the expense of companies that made them. One incident made news around the world in July 2009 when a hacker named Benjamin Moody cracked the cryptographic key of Texas Instrument 83 calculator and then made it do things it wasn't supposed to do. This led to Texas Instrument legally going after the hackers who were tinkering with its calculators. The clash made some news and offered a lot of lulz — like a hacker would say — to a lot of geeks.

So yes, some calculators can be hacked. But EVMs?

Whether EVMs can be hacked or not, and whether Indian EVMs in particular can be hacked or not, is a question that cannot be answered definitively. The reason for that is the "black box" part in Rahul Gandhi's tweet. He might be wrong but it is indeed true that we do not have enough information in the public domain to ascertain whether Indian EVMs are as safe and secure as some people believe them to be. At the same time, we cannot also say that they are not safe. We just don't have enough information and this, I believe, the Election Commission India (ECI) should fix.

Having said that, and to be specific to last week's EVM brouhaha involving Musk, Chandrasekhar, Rahul Gandhi and others, it is fair to believe that both camps are right. The dichotomy — as well as the confusion — is the result of how word hacking is perceived by Musk and how it is defined by Chandrasekhar. It is due to these different definitions of "Hacking" that we have two camps who hold contrasting opinions and yet both are likely right.

For people like Elon Musk, who is not just a part of Silicon Valley, but who has since his college days worked with computers, machines and code, the word hacking means making a machine do something that it is not built to do. And not just machines, but any object do something that it is not designed to do. The word is part of Silicon Valley parlance, a part of its culture that extends back to the 1970s and 80s. People at that time, including people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, were all hackers. Heck, Steve Jobs was even "hacking" his body by going on fad diets and eating apples — only apples — for days. In the early days of Silicon Valley, geeks were doing things with rudimentary computers such as Altair 8800 — barely as powerful as a basic calculator — that were possible only if they "hacked" into it.

That 70s hacking culture was directly responsible for the computer revolution that followed. The whole epoch was captured brilliantly by Steven Levy in his books Hackers, published in 1984. Levy writes in it, "Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high-tech.”

Seen from this point of view, it is easy to understand why technologists who are steeped in Silicon Valley culture tend to say something like "anything can be hacked", just the way Musk did. If you ask Elon Musk whether a cycle can be hacked or not, or whether a fountain pen can be hacked or not, his answer most likely will be yes. Hacking for him is simply a matter of modifying something and making it do things it is not originally created to do.

But hacking, the way most people here in India understand, is something to do with this idea of bypassing the security of a device through a network and then modifying it. The idea of hackers that we have comes from Hollywood films, where a lonely man sits in shadows in his basem*nt and then types fast and furious on his keyboard to bypass passwords on a bank server. And because many in India have this particular notion of hackers and hacking, they tend to argue that EVMs cannot be hacked because they aren't even connected to any network — wired or wireless.

Yet, people who believe EVMs in India cannot be hacked are also probably right. This is because if it doesn't connect to a network, and if its chip is barely programmable, then the only way it can be "hacked" is at an institutional level and with physical access to it. It's not that something like this is not possible, it is just that in India, where the opposition has their polling agents at every step of the election process, hacking of EVMs probably seems like a tin-foil theory instead of reality.

The only issue is that elections — and moreover the impression of them being free and fair — is too important to be paired with the word "probably". This is the word that, I believe, the ECI should deal with. This is possible only if there is more information about the workings of the Indian EVMs.

It is true that Indian EVMs do not have network connectivity. But they do have a programmable chip, which uses — probably a very lightweight — firmware to carry out instructions. We don't know what goes into this firmware, how secure it is and what it can do or not do. Similarly, we don't have enough details of EVM hardware in the public domain. The ECI has a lengthy FAQ section on its website, but it is full of many words that don't say much. The reason why this issue keeps cropping, even though there is probably no boogeyman in EVMs, is because for some reason or other, the ECI has always been cagey about sharing finer details. Fix that and you would fix the EVM hacking debates.

(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. He has been writing about personal technology and gadgets since 2005)

(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)