EC wants us to hack EVMs by magic: AAP

Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Friday accused the Election Commission of backing out of the EVM hackathon and said that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won’t participate in a challenge where touching the machines is not allowed.

“The EC, and not AAP, has backed out of the hackathon. I wonder what kind of a challenge is the EC throwing at us by not even allowing us to touch, open or use tools to hack electronic voting machines,” Sisodia said.

He mocked the poll panel by saying it wants people to tamper the EVMs by using a magic or mantra or by merely looking at it.

The party has also written a fresh letter to the poll commission, saying that its challenge has no tooth.

“You have said that tampering or replacing the motherboard of an EVM would mean that it is no longer the same device. (But) how would you know that the motherboards of the existing EC machines have not been replaced or tampered with,” AAP National Secretary Pankaj Gupta asked in a letter to the election commission.

“An institution that has always protected democracy” was not ready for an open hackathon to safeguard the country’s election process, the letter read.

“Hackers are invited to test the security of any system, using any tools available. Such ethical hacking is to help understand loopholes, so that they can be removed in the future,” it said.

The letter, to Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi, was in response to EC’s rejection of AAP’s demand that it be allowed to “tamper” with the EVM motherboard at the challenge. “Why is the Election Commission running away from noholds barred hackathon,” it asked.

Following this, AAP is unlikely to participate in the EVM challenge on June 3, party sources said. The last date to participate in the exercise ended on Friday.

The election commission has argued that the EVM would lose its originality if changes were made to its internal circuitry and “it would not be the EC’s EVM”.