New Delhi. On the controversy arising over the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), the Central Election Commission (ECI) on Sunday said in clear words that rumors are being spread about EVMs. Mumbai suburban district collector Vandana Suryavanshi said in a press conference regarding the ongoing controversy over EVMs that false news has been spread about EVMs and all the allegations are baseless. She said, “No OTP comes for unlocking the EVM, the news that is going around is completely wrong. EVM is not connected to any machine.”
Giving clarification on Rahul Gandhi’s tweet regarding EVM, he said, “The news that is going around is wrong. EVM does not require any OTP, rather the work is done by pressing the result button. The Election Commission has followed its complete process regarding EVM.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has questioned the use of EVMs and has advised to stop using them. After his statement, Congress also targeted EVMs. Party MP Rahul Gandhi said that EVMs are a ‘black box’ which no one is allowed to examine. He said that ‘serious concerns’ are being raised about the transparency of India’s electoral process.
The officer further said, “We had allowed some people to take mobile phones to upload data. But how did that mobile phone reach the concerned person, we have filed an FIR on that and the matter is being investigated. No one will get CCTV unless there is a court order.”
Rahul Gandhi posted on the social media platform ‘X’ and said, “When there is no accountability in the institutions, democracy becomes a sham and the possibility of rigging increases.” Along with this post, Gandhi also shared a news which claimed that a relative of the Shiv Sena candidate who won by 48 votes from the North-West Lok Sabha seat of Mumbai has a phone with which it was possible to tamper with EVMs.
The former Congress president also shared Elon Musk’s post on ‘X’ in which Musk had talked about eliminating EVMs. Musk had said in his post, “We should eliminate EVMs. The risk of being hacked by humans or artificial intelligence (AI), though small, is still very high.”
Opposition parties have been raising concerns over EVMs for some time now and had filed a petition in the apex court, appealing for 100 per cent matching of ‘Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail’ (VVPAT) slips, but the court did not accept it.
Tags: Election commission, Elon Musk, Rahul Gandhi
FIRST PUBLISHED : June 16, 2024, 16:58 IST