New Delhi: The Election Commission of India (ECI) had earlier rejected the claim of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that its Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) could be manipulated.
“It is common sense that gadgets other than EVMs of the Election Commission 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,” the EC had said in a statement in May, 2017.
Delhi Chief Minister (CM) Arvind Kejriwal had dared EC to provide an EVM, claiming it can be tampered within “flat 90 seconds.”
AAP leader Saurabh Bhardwaj even put on a live demonstration on how an EVM can be programmed to favour any political party.
“Bhardwaj showed how easy it is to hack EVMs and it is being done on a massive scale. It is dangerous for the democracy and the country, and people should raise their voice against it. The ECI can give us its machines, we will show how to hack it in 90 seconds by merely changing its motherboard,” Kejriwal had told media.
However, the Commission said the “so-called demonstration on extraneous and duplicate gadgets which are not owned by EC cannot be exploited to influence our intelligent citizens and electorate to assail or vilify the EVMs used by the Commission in its electoral process.”
