AAP's Saurabh Bhardwaj stages live demo of EVM tampering in Delhi Assembly

AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj claimed a secret code could be used to tamper with EVMs

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday claimed an electronic voting machine (EVM) can be tampered with “within 90 seconds flat” and dared the Election Commission to provide a EVM to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to prove his claim.
 
AAP’s member of legislative Assembly (MLA) from Greater Kailash Saurabh Bhardwaj claimed that you need only know a “secret code” to be able to tamper with EVMs and the code can be fed into a machine while casting vote.
 
The AAP gave a “demonstration” on ways to rig an “electronic voting machine”, and said the EVMs are a “threat to democracy”. The demonstration was made by Bhardwaj inside the Assembly. Bhardwaj, a software engineer before joining politics, said it takes “90 seconds” to change the motherboard of EVMs and that all votes can be polled in favour of a particular political party.
 

 

The “electronic voting machines” Bhardwaj made the demonstration on was a prototype assembled by a group of IITians, AAP sources said.
 
The Election Commission rejected the claim its EVMs can be hacked, saying the machine hacked in the Delhi Assembly was a “look-alike” gadget and not an actual equipment used by it. “It is common sense that gadgets other than ECI-EVMs can be programmed to perform in a pre-determined way, but it simply cannot be implied that ECI-EVMs will behave in the same manner because they are technically secured and function under an elaborate administrative and security protocol,” the Commission said in a statement.

 
During the demonstration, Bhardwaj showed how votes polled in favour of AAP can be transferred to the BJP. He proceeded to press each of the five buttons representing various political parties on the EVM twice. Bhardwaj showed “secret codes” that were used to tamper the EVM he was testing. He punched in one of the “secret codes”. He then said it was possible to tell which candidate was winning and who “should be made to win”. He punched in additional votes using various buttons and then “demonstrated” there was a difference between the votes tendered and the results on the test EVM.

 
Bharadwaj said: “The report by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the Bhind incident makes no sense. On what basis were they arguing that EVMs can't be tampered with? I have 10 years of programming experience in embedded systems. It takes just 90 seconds to change (an EVM's) motherboard.”
 
AAP has been claiming that faulty EVMs were the reasons for its defeat in Punjab and Goa Assembly elections.
 
Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the AAP will participate in an EVM Hackathon, to be organised by the poll panel later this month, and will prove how an EVM can be tampered with. Sisodia also challenged the EC to allow at least three AAP workers in place of those who service EVMs at store rooms and said they will “completely hack” all machines.