PTI
New Delhi, May 9: Amid an intense debate on whether EVMs were tamper-proof, the AAP Tuesday “demonstrated” in the state Assembly how the vote machines could be rigged, a claim trashed by the Election Commission, which said a “duplicate” gadget was hacked.
Participating in a discussion on the issue during the day-long special session of the Delhi Assembly, AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj dramatically claimed a voting machine can 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”, Bhardwaj, himself an engineer, showed how it could be tampered with to favour a particular candidate. After entering a “secret code”, Bhardwaj pressed 10 votes for the AAP but the display panel of the machine showed the votes went to the BJP.
“We are not making baseless allegations on EVM manipulation. With this demonstration, it has been proved that EVMs can actually be hacked,” Bhardwaj claimed. “EVM manipulation is a very serious issue. It is a danger to the democracy of the country. There is no machine in the world which cannot be hacked,” he said.
After a string of electoral reverses, including the recent ones in Goa, Punjab and the latest in Delhi municipal elections, the AAP has been insisting on scrapping EVMs and going back to ballot papers. The Election Commission, however, rejected the claim of the Aam Aadmi Party that its EVMs can be tampered with, saying the machine hacked in the Delhi assembly was a “look-alike” gadget and not the actual equipment used by it. “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,” the Commission said in a statement.
The “so-called” demonstration on “extraneous and duplicate gadgets” which are not owned by the 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,” it added.
BJP called the hack “demonstration” a “drama”. “It was a drama enacted by the AAP to divert attention of the public from the allegations of bribery and forgery in donations received by it,” Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari said. Before Bhardwaj’s demonstration, Kejriwal tweeted, “Saurabh Bhardwaj will reveal the truth behind a big conspiracy in the country. Satyameva Jayate”.
