An American computer scientist, J Alex Halderman, who had co-authored a study titled “India’s EVMs are vulnerable to fraud”, was not allowed to enter the country after landing at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport in New Delhi on Sunday evening and was detained for 18 hours without giving reason for the action. However Halderman and another scientist Gonggrijp were allowed to step outside the airport as the sat on floor and refused to go back until the authority tells them why they were asked to go back.

Halderman, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of Michigan, has arrived in India to attend a technical conference in Gujarat.

The conference that Halderman is scheduled to attend is going to be held at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute in Gandhinagar, the capital city of Gujarat. Halderman is to present a tutorial lecture on 15th December on the subject ‘Security Issues in Electronic Voting’ at sixth International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2010) here. The tutorial lecture will be taken by Halderman, Rop Gonggrijp, Hari K. Prasad, and Poorvi Vora together. Gonggrijp is anti-evm activist who was also associated with Wikileaks till March according to his website.

In February this year, top researchers from India, US and Netherlands, had come up with a study which said that EVMs are prone to tampering. Halderman and his Indian co-author, Hari K Prasad, were part of the group.

Earlier, the Election Commission had challenged Prasad to demonstrate how EVMs could be tampered with. The EC, however, withheld access to the EVMs.

In his blog about the study, Halderman wrote: “Despite widespread reports of election irregularities and suspicions of electronic fraud, the Election Commission has never permitted security researchers to complete an independent evaluation. Hari and others in India repeatedly offered to collaborate with the Election Commission to better understand the security of the machines, but they were not permitted to complete a serious review.”

He added: “Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are ‘tamperproof,’ but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source. The story took a disturbing turn when my co-author, Hari Prasad, was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.”

Security Analysis of India’s Electronic Voting Machines:Halderman’s published report

Conference that Halderman is going to attend

-Inputs from Indian Express article