No 'Hackathon', no change in motherboard: EC says to parties

New Delhi: The Election Commission today clarified to the Aam Aadmi Party(AAP) that the June 3 Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) challenge will not be a 'Hackathon'. It also told the Congress that no changes will be allowed in the motherboard of the machines. The Poll Panel said no 'promise' about a 'no-holds barred Hackathon' was ever made or announced by the Commission. 'The statement that Commission is "backtracking" from hackathon is absolutely baseles,' the Poll Panel said in its reply to the AAP's response to its invite.

The Commission has specified that the EVM challenge would be conducted within the framework of the existing administrative safeguards and security protocols strictly followed in the field when EVMs are deployed. The Poll Panel said the EVMs are not accessible to any unauthorised person at any stage before, during or after the polls and as such, the question of allowing 'tools' for tampering the EVM machines does not arise. 'An EVM with a different 'internal circuit' is simply a different machine or look alike of ECI EVM, hence can never be guaranteed by ECI to give correct results.

Such a scenario is completely ruled out within our administrative safeguards and that's why it is not proposed in the Challenge, " the Poll Panel said in its reply to the Congress' response to its invite in which the party had demanded to permit to access motherboard. NCP and CPI(M) will be the only two parties which will participate in Election Commission's Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) Challenge beginning from June 3.

In the wake of complaints made by political parties on the alleged possibility of "tampering and hacking" of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), the Election Commission on May 20 had thrown an open challenge to all the recognised national and state parties to "demonstrate" and have a try at the same at various sessions beginning June 3. (UNI)