But how did we get here? Why are EVMs, which were meant to be safer and less easy to tamper with than paper ballots, under the scanner?

Questions over manipulation of Electronic Voting Machines have been a fixture of mainstream Indian politics since 2009, when senior BJP leader LK Advani alleged that EVMs weren’t foolproof. Current BJP spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao wrote an entire book on the topic in 2010, in which Advani noted that many countries like Germany had banned their use.

After the BJP came to power in the Centre in 2014, Opposition parties took up the baton, alleging tampering of EVMs at regular intervals.

The most recent example of this was when the AAP and the Congress raised concerns about malfunctions and alleged attempts to tamper with EVMs during the recent round of state elections. 3 percent of EVMs in Madhya Pradesh experienced glitches during the elections in November 2018, and there were a string of suspicious incidents in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan involving EVMs.

These included an SUV ramming into a strong room in MP, apprehension of purported Reliance Jio employees near an EVM-strong room in Jagdalpur, and the discovery of an EVM in a BJP Rajasthan MLA’s house.

The Congress complained to the Election Commission about potential hacking of EVMs via Bluetooth during the Gujarat election in 2017, a claim rejected by the EC after an inquiry. The same year, the BSP also claimed tampering during the Uttar Pradesh elections, while the AAP alleged tampering in Punjab.