‘No’ to plea to play with motherboard

The Election Commission on Thursday turned down the Aam Aadmi Party’s demand to allow tampering with the motherboard of the electronic voting machine (EVM) while participating in a challenge to hack the machine beginning June 3.

Responding to the AAP’s letter, the commission, citing a “demonstration” by its legislator Saurabh Bhardwaj on how to rig an election result by tampering with the EVM motherboard, said: “It must be clearly understood that it is possible for anyone to make any electronic gadget which looks like ECI-EVM and demonstrate any magic or tampering.”

Different gadget

“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 bearing on the commission’s EVMs. Any person with reasonable common sense can understand that gadgets other than ECI-EVMs can be programmed to perform in a pre-determined way,” it said.

The EC has so far not received any application for participation in the challenge. Parties can confirm participation by 5 p.m. on Friday.

The EC letter said that such so-called “demonstration” on extraneous and duplicate gadgets, which were not owned by the commission, could not be misused and exploited to mislead and influence our intelligent citizens and electorate to assail or vilify the EVMs used by the commission in its electoral process.

On the party’s demand for allowing change or tampering of the EVM motherboard of EVM during the challenge, the EC said allowing any such change was like saying that anyone should be permitted to manufacture a new machine and introduce new EVMs in the ECI system, which was implausible and irrational.

“It is common knowledge that changing the motherboard or internal circuitry of any electronic device is like changing the whole device itself,” the EC said.