EC gets ready for ‘EVM challenge’

The Election Commission will announce on Saturday the schedule for an open challenge to hack its electronic voting machines (EVM).

Before announcing the dates and modalities of the hack challenge, the commission will hold a nearly two-hour long demo of its EVM machines in the national capital, the poll body said in a statement here.

“We will announce the schedule for this challenge to EVMs tomorrow,” an EC spokesman said on Friday.

At an all-party meeting on May 12, Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi had said political parties had to demonstrate their claim that EVMs used in the recent assembly polls could have been tampered with.

In 2009, the commission had held out a similar challenge when it demonstrated the functioning of EVMs brought in from various parts of the country to Vigyan Bhavan here.

At the all-party meet, most parties said EVMs could be used for future elections if they came with a paper trail machine, which would enable the electorate to check if their vote had been registered against the person of their choice.

Parties like AAP, BSP, SP and the Congress had alleged that the EVM machines were tampered with in the recently held Assembly polls.

The AAP had even held a hacking demonstration of what it called a prototype EVM within the precincts of the Delhi Assembly. To this, the poll body had maintained that it was impossible to hack the EVMs of the Election Commission.