Zeenews Bureau
New Delhi, July 05: Senior BJP leader LK Advani has expressed apprehensions about the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in elections, saying they are prone to rigging.
Advani, who was BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in the recent Lok Sabha polls, further demanded that the ballot papers be reintroduced, starting with the Assembly Elections in Maharashtra scheduled for October, and three other states later this year.
“We should revert to ballot papers unless the Election Commission is able to ensure that Electronic Voting Machines are foolproof and every possibility of their malfunctioning is taken care of,” Advani told
The Sunday Express.
This is the first time a mainstream political party has raised doubts about the reliability of EVMs.
While demanding the scrapping of the use of EVMs, Advani referred to several instances: Electronic voting has been banned altogether in Germany, while in the US there are elaborate guidelines for voting through EVMs.
He further stressed that “no one was raising any questions like rigging or malpractices in the elections”, but larger questions about the “possibility of EVMs’ malfunctioning...must be addressed”.
The newspaper, however, quoted Election Commissioner SY Quraishi as saying that the “poll panel was absolutely satisfied that EVMs couldn’t be manipulated”. He added that a parliamentary sub-committee has already appointed a technical committee headed by former IIT-Madras director PV Indiresan “to ensure this”.
After the recent Lok Sabha polls, several BJP state units had alleged “malpractices through EVMs”. The issue also cropped up at a meeting of BJP’s newly-elected MPs last month.
Former Delhi chief secretary Omesh Saigal had renewed the debate on EVMs reliability when he claimed recently that “rigging of EVMs was very much possible” and that a programme written by a junior programmer showed that the final results could vary “if the pre-programmed code number was keyed in into the machine”.
Saigal, who retired as secretary to Government of India, had in a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla said that he had conducted a detailed study along with information technology experts which showed that rigging of EVMs was “possible and plausible”.
“It is an important issue as the fate of this country’s democratic set-up hinges on the fairness of the elections. There shouldn’t be an iota of doubt about the same,” he had told the same newspaper.
Saigal had also referred to a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins University and Rice University, which proved that if one is able to gain access to the source code of an EVM, he can then cast unlimited ballots without detection.
“To see if a similar fraud could be done in India, on my request a young programmer wrote a very simple programme which could skew the result if a pre-programmed code number was keyed in. A mock poll showed that every 5th vote after the first 10 would go in favour of a particular candidate. This poll was conducted in the presence of some eminent people, whose names have also been sent to the CEC. I intend to conduct this poll before the EC,” Saigal told the daily.