Access to EVM motherboard denied

The Election Commission on Saturday rejected the demand of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to give them access to the motherboard of electronic voting machines (EVM) during the upcoming EVM challenge.

The commission said that “tampering or allowing the changing of internal circuit etc., of the EVM is like saying that they should be permitted to manufacture a new machine and introduce their new EVMs in our system”.

“It is common knowledge that changing the internal circuit of any electronic device is like changing the whole device itself, after which it is no longer the same device. As any person with common sense will be able to appreciate, a non-ECI EVM (Election Commission of India Electronic Voting Machines) or an EVM with a different internal circuit is simply a different machine or look alike of ECI EVM, hence can never be guaranteed by ECI to give correct results.

Such a scenario is completely ruled out within our administrative safeguards and that’s why it is not proposed in the challenge”, the commission told the parties. The commission also rejected the AAP claim about the ECI promise of no-holds barred hackathon.

Insisting that the commission never made or promised about a “no-holds barred hackathon”, the ECI said, “In the all-party meeting held on May 12, 2017, the commission clearly said that it will offer an EVM Challenge and not a hackathon”.

The Congress and the AAP shot off separate letters to the ECI on Friday, demanding that they should be allowed to access the motherboard during the event and conditions imposed for the challenge should be relaxed.

As the deadline for giving acceptance to take part in the event ended on Friday evening, only two political parties, the CPM and the NCP, agreed to participate in the challenge on June 3 at Delhi.

Though the Congress and the AAP did not say that they will not take part in the programme, their letter to the ECI does not contain anything on their participation. However, the BJP, CPI and the Rashtriya Lok Dal have shown interest in observing the challenge.