The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has said that a delegation would meet the Election Commission on Thursday, demanding that VVPAT-equipped Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) be used for all elections in the future.
The Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) is an independent verification printer machine attached to EVMs. It allows voters to verify if their vote has gone to the intended candidate.
‘Save Democracy’
The party announced that its Delhi MLAs and senior leaders would lead a protest rally called ‘Save Democracy Movement’ in front of the EC’s office around 11 a.m. on Thursday.
Rejecting the EC’s claims that EVMs cannot be manipulated, the party on Wednesday said that MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj’s ‘live demonstration’ in the Assembly had “proven” that EVMs could be rigged by tampering with the motherboard.
AAP’s Delhi convenor Gopal Rai told journalists that the party would participate in an all-party meeting called by the EC on the issue on Friday.
“The Commission, in its response, said we used a dummy and not an actual machine in yesterday’s [Tuesday] demonstration. We request the EC to arrange a hackathon. We will show how its machines can be rigged,” Mr. Rai said.
Apart from demanding that VVPAT-equipped EVMs be used, the party will also request the EC that votes registered in EVMs and paper trails of 25% randomly chosen booths be tallied, the AAP leader said.
Senior leaders added that it was the right of the voters to ensure their votes were being cast for the candidate they chose.
Participating in a discussion on the issue during a day-long special session of the Assembly on Tuesday, Mr. Bhardwaj had claimed that a voting machine could be manipulated by simply feeding it with a “secret code”. Using what his party claimed was a “prototype EVM” developed by “a group of IITians”, Mr. Bhardwaj, himself an engineer, showed how it could be tampered with to favour a particular candidate.
