India: Row over India’s electronic voting machines leaves electors dazed | Al Arabiya

The brouhaha over use of smart electronic voting machines (EVMs) in India’s legislative elections has reached an ear-splitting pitch, leaving the 850 million constituents confused and confounded. All set for the five-year general polls scheduled for 2019, India’s Election Commission has time and again asseverated that the voter-friendly devices are tamper-proof and cannot be manipulated, but opposition parties have been demanding a ban on the high-tech gizmos and want the poll panel to return to the good old paper ballot system. Browned off by the belligerent mood of seven national and 35 recognized state parties bent on blowing the whistle, the exasperated commission has now thrown a gauntlet before them and invited politicos of all hues to examine the EVMs from June 3 onwards and show how the indigenously-manufactured machines can be hacked.

The opposition parties in India ruled by the National Democratic Alliance, a center-right political alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), first made a stink about ‘faulty’ EVMs in March when the BJP registered spectacular victories in four of the five states that held assembly polls and again in municipal elections in Delhi.

A Congress-led delegation of opposition parties, chiefly the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), had even submitted a memorandum to President Pranab Mukherjee on the alleged irregularities in the eye-catching contraptions 1.4 million of which will be used in the world’s biggest democratic exercise in 2019.

AAP media coordinator Harshil Nayak told this correspondent how, on May 9, a party lawmaker used a dummy machine and demonstrated in the Delhi assembly the ways in which EVMs could be tinkered with in India, the largest participatory democracy of the world with about 850 million registered voters.

Full Article: Row over India’s electronic voting machines leaves electors dazed – Al Arabiya English.