Amid renewed apprehension of tampering of EVMs by incumbent Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora on Wednesday asserted that the machines cannot be tampered with and that there was no question of going back to the ballot paper.
Arora also said that the Commission would engage with political parties in the coming days on various electoral reforms and the model code of conduct.
Addressing a ‘Summit’ of a television news channel, he lamented that day-to-day dialogue is becoming “more coarse “ and it should be “avoided”.
The CEC said EVMs can malfunction like a car or a pen but they cannot be tampered with. The EVMs are in use for 20 years now and there was no question of returning to the ballot paper, he emphasised.
Various courts, including the Supreme Court, have upheld the use of the machines to cast votes, he elaborated.
Responding to a question on holding Lok Sabha and Assembly polls simultaneously, Arora said the call on the subject has to be taken at the political level. Once a decision is taken by the Government, the Election Commission can only facilitate its implementation.
The CEC also informed the audience that his colleagues in the EC are collaborating with Indian Institute of Technology, Madras to set up a “block chain” system where, say a person from Rajasthan working in Chennai can vote for elections in Rajasthan while remaining in the Tamil Nadu capital.
He clarified that this does not mean people can vote from home but will have to visit designated places to exercise their franchise.
For the block chain system to be implemented, changes in law may be required, according to another EC official.
After political parties questioned the reliability of the EVMs, the EC had organized an EVM challenge in 2017 for them to prove that the machines can be tampered with. But none of the parties turned up for the challenge, leading the EC to exhort that the political parties should stop crying foul at they ran away from the EVM challenge.
Later in an affidavit before the Supreme Court, the EC had said it had invited all parties to prove that the voting machines can be tampered with, but no one turned up. The EC response to the SC came on petitions by the Congress and BSP regarding the functioning of EVMs.