London: India's voting machines - considered to be among the world's most tamperproof - can be hacked, American scientists claim. Researchers at the University of Michigan connected a home-made device to a voting machine and successfully changed results by sending text messages from a mobile.
"We made an imitation display board that looks almost exactly like the real display in the machines. But underneath some of the components of the board, we hide a microprocessor and a Bluetooth radio," the BBC quoted Prof J Alex Halderman, who led the project, as saying.
He added: "Our lookalike display board intercepts the vote totals that the machine is trying to display and replaces them with dishonest totals - basically whatever the bad guy wants to show up at the end of the election."
Moreover, they added a small microprocessor, which they say can change the votes stored in the machine between the election and the vote-counting session. However, India''s Deputy Election Commissioner, Alok Shukla, said getting hold of machines to tamper with would be very difficult.
He said: "It is not just the machine, but the overall administrative safeguards which we use that make it absolutely impossible for anybody to open the machine.
"Before the elections take place, the machine is set in the presence of the candidates and their representatives. These people are allowed to put their seal on the machine, and nobody can open the machine without breaking the seals."
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