4 minutes reading time
I don't trust a machine that doesn't have a soul.
The latest election is over, and while everyone is arguing about who won or lost, I’m still staring at the little grey box. The EVM. The Electronic Voting Machine. They tell us it’s the marvel of the modern world. They tell us it’s unhackable. They tell us it has saved the country from booth-capturing and ballot-stuffing.
Maybe it has. But it has replaced one kind of theft with another: the theft of certainty.
When I was younger, you walked into a booth, you held a piece of paper, you saw the symbol, you pressed the stamp, and you folded it. You saw your vote. It was a physical thing. It had weight. It had the smell of ink. When they counted the votes, you could see the piles. You could see the reality of the people’s will.
Now, you press a button and a light blinks. A beep sounds. And then... nothing.
Your vote has entered a microchip. It has been converted into a series of electronic pulses. Who wrote the code for that chip? Who tested it? Who owns the source code?
The answer is: "Don't worry about it."
That is not a democratic answer. In a democracy, "Don't worry about it" is the first line of a funeral dirge.
They realized people were getting suspicious, so they introduced the VVPAT—the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail. You press the button, and for seven seconds, a little window shows you a slip of paper with your choice. Then it falls into a sealed box.
It’s a pacifier. It’s a toy they give to a crying child to make them think they are being heard.
Because if that paper falls into a box and nobody ever counts it, does it actually exist? Right now, the Election Commission only matches the paper slips in a tiny, symbolic fraction of polling stations. In the rest, the electronic count is final.
If the machine says 100 votes for Candidate A, and the paper slips say 50 for Candidate A and 50 for Candidate B, but the box is never opened—who won?
The machine won. The software won. The person who controlled the centralization of the counting won.
They tell us the machines are safe because they aren't connected to the internet. "Standalone machines," they say. "No bluetooth, no wifi."
As if that matters.
You don't need a network to rig a machine if you control the manufacturing. You don't need a hacker in a basement if the person who programmed the chip in the first place decided that every fifth vote for "Other" should be rounded up to "Ruling Party."
When you centralize the counting of a billion votes into closed-source microchips manufactured by government-owned corporations, you aren't making democracy efficient. You are making it easy to kill.
In the old days, to rig an election, you had to hire a thousand goons to capture a thousand booths. It was messy. It was visible. It was hard to scale. Today, you just need a few lines of code and a "standalone" machine that nobody is allowed to audit.
I saw a man at the booth last week. He pressed the button, watched the VVPAT slip, and then he stood there for a second, looking confused. He looked at the machine like it was a magician who had just made his wallet disappear.
He didn't look like a citizen participating in a triumph of technology. He looked like a victim who had been told to be grateful.
Democracy isn't just about the result; it’s about the belief in the result. The moment you move the counting from the visible world to the invisible world of microchips, you have broken the social contract. You have asked us to trade our eyes for faith.
And I have very little faith left.
I’m going to go count the coconuts in my backyard. At least I can see them. At least they don't have a "standalone" firmware.