14 | MYANMAR’S ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES RAISE RISKS FOR ELECTORAL INTEGRITY There are also technical concerns about the MEVM. At face value, its hardware architecture is simple and appears to be similar to that of Indian EVMs. It includes three core components: - a ballot unit for casting votes. - a control unit for use by polling staff. This counts the number of voting tokens issued throughout the day and produces the final tally at closing time. - a verification unit, comprising a voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) printer so that voters can double-check for whom they voted, and a receptacle for the VVPATs. Template polling station layouts released by the UEC reveal that there will be at least three MEVMs per polling station, with one each per election (Pyithu Hluttaw, Amyotha Hluttaw, and state/ region hluttaw), and more in the case of elections for ethnic affairs ministers. MEVMs are battery-powered and do not connect to the Internet. It is unknown at this time how the UEC plans to transmit and aggregate the results after voting hours. The core issue with the Myanmar Electronic Voting Machine is that its software and transmission protocols are opaque to anyone but the UEC. No civil society organization, political party, media, or independent authority was invited to review the source code used, and no access to the transmission and tabulation of results will be granted by the UEC. Several stakeholders interviewed believe that the MEVMs were introduced by the UEC to control and, if necessary, inflate voter turnout or fabricate election results according to desired 59