Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh on January 24 raised doubts over the reliability of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and demanded that VVPAT slips be handed over to voters for dropping them inside the ballot box.
Election results should be declared by counting these slips only, said the Rajya Sabha member, prompting the BJP to retort that Mr. Singh was questioning the victory of his party in Karnataka and Telangana as well as his son in Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls.
“EVMs are being used for conducting elections only in India, Australia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Brazil,” he claimed. “The software used in Australia is in the midst of the public domain and anyone can access it,” he said.
“But in India, it is not and the Election Commission of India is not putting it (the software) in the public domain on the grounds that it can be hacked,” Mr. Singh said in a press conference in Bhopal called to “demonstrate” how the VVPAT machine is not recording proper votes.
Mr. Singh has questioned the reliability of the EVMs on more than one occasion following the Congress’ defeat in the recent Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
“If conducting elections through ballot papers is not possible, then Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips should be handed over to voters and they, after verifying it, should be allowed to drop it into the ballot box,” he said.
The Congress leader also demanded that election results be declared by counting these VVPAT slips and not through the EVMs that record the votes polled by the various candidates.
Mr. Singh and a Gujarat-based computer engineer Atul Patel gave what they claimed was a demonstration of how VVPAT records votes. “If the button is pressed for a longer period, it records multiple votes and not to the symbol that people have actually voted for,” they claimed.
During the “demonstration”, 10 votes were cast in favour of imaginary symbols such as Banana, Apple and Watermelon. “While Banana polled four votes, Apple got five and Watermelon got one,” they said. “However, when the slips were counted Apple got 8, Banana 3 and Watermelon 1 which proved that the machine was not recording proper votes,“ Mr. Patel said.
“Votes polled for Banana were transferred to Apple as the machine was programmed to ensure victory of Apple,” he claimed. He said that earlier the glass over the VVPAT machine was transparent, but after 2017, it was made dark which raises doubt over its authenticity.
Mr. Singh claimed that many questions were raised through Right to Information (RTI) applications over the reliability of the EVMs but “no satisfactory answers were given”. He also demanded that a petition pending on the issue of EVMs in the Supreme Court be handed over to the full Bench to decide the matter.
When asked how the Congress won in Karnataka and other States if EVMs are hacked, Mr. Singh said that “they (BJP government) are doing it selectively so that no doubts are raised about it”.
“BJP does it in those States only where victory is possible and not in those like Kerala and Tamil Nadu where they are not sure about the party’s prospects of coming to power,” he said.
BJP spokesman Narendra Saluja said that by doubting the EVM, Mr. Singh is raising questions over the victory of Congress in Karnataka, Telangana, and the 66 MLAs, including his son Jaivardhan Singh, in Madhya Pradesh in the recent Assembly polls.
Pankaj Chaturvedi, another BJP spokesman, said that “it (raising questions over EVMs) amounts to disrespecting the people of India” and they will give Congress a befitting reply.
Mr. Chaturvedi also quipped that the Congress has started searching for excuses for its “certain defeat” in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
