AAP rigs EVM in House, EC unimpressed
The house concluded by passing a resolution urging the president and the election commission to endorse VVPAT in all EVMs.
New Delhi: Delhi Assembly’s day-long special session on Tuesday saw high drama as the ruling AAP sought to demonstrate how easy it is to rig the electronic voting machines (EVMs). The house concluded by passing a resolution urging the president and the election commission to endorse VVPAT in all EVMs.
“All it takes is 90 seconds,” AAP MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj said while dem-onstrating to the House how secret codes can be us-ed to manipulate the EVMs. AAP was a divided house when the party leadership raised suspicion against EVMs following the defeats in Delhi civic elections and Assembly polls in Punjab and Goa. Kumar Vishwas, one of the senior-most AAP functionaries and sacked minister Kapil Mishra were among the few who said it was not right for the party to blame the EVMs for its electoral defeats.
Mr Bhardwaj, using a dummy EVM, alleged that on the polling a six-digit secret code could be fed to manipulate a machine wh-ile casting vote. The Election Commission denied his claim that EVMs can be programmed to favour any particular party.
“We have said that EC should give us an EVM. We only need to change the motherboard,” CM Arvind Kejriwal said. His deputy Manish Sisodia claimed th-at the democracy is in danger and urged rivals to look beyond the theory of “your machine vs my machine”.
“We can hack EVM machines across Delhi in three days,” Mr Sisodia said, claiming that a party in power would never have the courage to question the machines.
The Election Commission of India has, however, dismissed the EVM claims. It said that the demonstration of the tampering was of a “lookalike” EVM and it should be understood that it was not possible for anyone to make any electronic gadget which looks like ECI-EVM and demonstrate any “magic or tampering”.
In a statement, the EC said: “Very simply put, any ‘lookalike’ machine is just a different gadget, which is manifestly designed and made to function in a ‘tampered’ manner and has no relevance, incidence or be-aring on the commission’s EVMs.”