Check out blackboxvoting.com. To those of you who think that our Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are the best things to have happened to Indian democracy: if you still hold that opinion after seeing the material in this site, well, you're not thinking straight.

If voting irregularities documented in blackboxvoting.com can occur on such a scale in a (supposedly) mature democracy like America, we poor third-worlders stand no chance.

Just imagine: you dutifully queue up behind a hundred people, awaiting your turn to exercise your franchise. You walk up to the EVM, scan through the list of pathetic symbols like umbrellas, cycles and condoms (just kidding [*]), identify your candidate, and press the button. The machine dutifully emits a long beep, saying, in effect, "Thank you, Sir/Madam. Your vote has been recorded. Have a nice day!" What if it is really thinking, "Ha ha, so long, sucker #12134... next sucker, please.."

The only saving grace is that, unlike the voting machines in America, our EVMs are stand-alone machines (i.e. they are not connected to each other or to a central server; neither, God forbid, to the Internet).

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy": Greg Palast's expose of, among other things, the malpractices in the American presidential elections of 2000.

[*] Come to think of it, this might be a good way to reinforce birth-control policies.