AAP protests outside EC over 'EVM tampering'

Hundreds of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) activists on Thursday protested outside the Election Commission headquarters here against alleged tampering of electronic voting machines (EVMs) during recent state polls.

The demonstrators, who included several AAP legislators, raised slogans against the poll panel and carried placards calling for an end to alleged tampering of the electronic voting machines.

AAP leader and Delhi Minister Gopal Rai said, "Voices have been raised in Maharashtra, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand against EVM tampering."

"Our MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj has shown that EVMs can be easily hacked," he said.

Rai demanded that the doubts regarding the EVMs should be resolved.

"We appeal to the Election Commission that they provide us their EVM and we will hack it," Rai, who is also the party's Delhi convenor, told reporters.

He also demanded that the Supreme Court's 2013 order of conducting elections by using the EVMs equipped with Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) should be implemented.

A delegation led by Rai met the officials of the Election Commission and submitted them a memorandum of three demands.

The demands included that the commission should allow technical inspection of its EVMs by the expert panels of various political parties to see if EVMs can be hacked.

"All the future elections should be conducted only on VVPAT enabled machines. In randomly picked 25 per cent of total polling booths in a constituency, EVM counting results must be tallied with the VVPAT slips to ckeck the accuracy of the EVM machines," the AAP's memoranum of demands said.

The Delhi unit of the Congress criticised the AAP's move, saying there was no need for any protest when the Election Commission has called an all-party meeting on Friday.

"They are talking about the use of VVPAT in elections but they should be aware that the EC had used VVPAT in the Rajouri Garden by-poll where the AAP got only 13 per cent of vote. AAP is doing this to divert the attention of people from the main issues," Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken told IANS.

--IANS

am-aks/vgu/vt