EC seeks suggestions on EVMs at all party meeting today, may announce hackathon date

The Election Commission is holding an all-party meeting with stakeholders to seek their feedback on EVMs. Read to know more.

The electronic voting machine (EVM) has been the centre of a lot of controversy lately, with political parties left, right and centre levelling allegations that it has been rigged, hacked or otherwise tampered with to give the BJP an unfair advantage in elections.

All those allegations are expected to come to a head on Friday, May 12, at the all-party meeting the Election Commission (EC) has called in the light of questions raised from all quarters. This could also be the forum where the poll panel announces the date of the EVM hackathon — the event where it says people will be thrown an open challenge to hack EVMs.

The all-party meeting comes barely three days after Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj brought an "EVM-like" device to the Delhi Assembly and demonstrated that it could be hacked and reprogrammed. The EC subsequently pointed out that the hacking of any device that looks like an EVM does not mean that an EVM is hackable or has been hacked.

Nevertheless, the poll panel is expected to invite suggestions from the seven political parties — including the Congress, the AAP, the SP and the BSP — that are attending the meeting on what can be done to allay their fears that the BJP is rigging elections through hacked EVMs.

See how the AAP had demonstrated the hacking of the EVM-like device:

One demand that is sure to come up at the all-party meeting on Friday is that EVMs be done away with altogether, and only ballot papers be used in polls henceforth — something the AAP had called for before the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections. The EC is unlikely to listen to this demand.

The next logical step for the political parties would be to demand that Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) be used along with EVMs, to help people keep track of where their vote went. This is another demand the AAP had made before the MCD elections. The EC this time will be more than happy to agree to this, given that it has already ordered 16.15 lakh VVPAT machines — to be brought from two PSUs.