Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislator and senior leader Saurabh Bhardwaj said that the Election Commission should constitute an all-party committee to ascertain if electronic voting machines (EVMs) can be hacked or not.
“A committee comprising representatives of all parties and members of the EC should be formed in the monitoring of the commission. The experts of our (AAP) technical team will easily show to the committee whether EVMs were rigged in the recent elections or not,” said Mr. Bhardwaj.
Technical expertise
The EC has called for an all-party meeting on Friday, where all the doubts regarding EVMs and their authenticity are likely to be cleared. Explaining how AAP's team would prove that EVMs were tampered with, he said: “We will ask every party to name any five booths, where they were expecting victory for sure and suspect that the EVMs were rigged in those wards. We will ask the EC to provide us the EVMs of those booths. Our technical teams have the technology and the expertise to prove whether those EVMs were tampered with or not.”
Mr. Bhardwaj said they will access the EVM technology, and then match the information with the voters list.
The commission can then verify with selected voters on the party that they voted for. If the person’s choice doesn’t match the records, the EC should concede that EVMs are rigged, he said.
Mr. Bhardwaj had earlier demonstrated how an EVM-like machine can be hacked by changing the motherboard. After the demo, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also claimed that if EVMs can be tampered with in just 90 seconds then it is the responsibility of the EC to ensure that such cases do not happen in the future.
‘Not real EVMs’
The poll panel reacted to this saying that the machine used to conduct live demonstration was merely a ‘look-alike’. “It is common sense that gadgets other than ECI EVMs can be programmed to perform in a pre-determined way, but it simply cannot be implied that ECI EVMs will behave in the same manner because they are technically secured and function under an elaborate administrative and security protocol,” an official release said.
