After Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) registered a landslide victory in the Assembly Elections 2017, the opposition parties claimed that Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were tampered during the voting. Reacting to such accusations, the Election Commission of India has given an open challenge to the political parties to test the infallibility of the EVMs.
According to a report published in The Indian Express, “the poll panel has decided to bring back the exercise it conducted in 2009, when similar accusations were made against EVMs.”
The report said, representatives from various political parties will be invited to take part in the open challenge.
To put all doubts to rest, EC sources said, “In 2009, too, we gave an open challenge to political parties who said EVMs can be tampered. Now in 2017, we will repeat this exercise. Soon a date will be decided for this challenge.”
Earlier on Monday, Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal had challenged the EC to make the EVMs available to the party for 72 hours and claimed that “we will read the code and rewrite it too”.
After BJP’s victory in Uttar Pradesh elections, Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress claimed of EVM tampering.
The political parties have demanded that EVMs should not be used for elections unless equipped with a Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) facility.
The issue of faulty EVMs was raised again after reports that a VVPAT machine used during a trial in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhind only dispensed slips with the ruling BJP’s poll symbol.
