The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) held back its plan to hold a parallel “Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) hackathon” besides the Election Commission and started a registration process first on Saturday. The EC, however, went ahead and held an EVM tampering challenge in which very few political parties participated.
Addressing a Press conference, chief spokesperson of AAP’s Delhi unit Saurabh Bharadwaj said that the EC’s “EVM challenge” was an “eye-wash” said AAP is only launching the registration process by inviting all technocrats to hack their EVM machines under the EC’s guidelines.
“The participants,” Bharadwaj added, “can get themselves registered at a link given at the party website.”
Bharadwaj said the AAP has also written to the EC along with BEl and ECIl (companies which manufacture EVMs) and have invited them to take part in the challenge along with their technical expert team. The registration process will remain open for a week and after that the real event will be organised, he said.
Bharadwaj claimed that no political party participated in the EC’s “EVM challenge” and thus has “vindicated AAPs stand” that the EVM challenge under EC’s conditions was a “pointless exercise”.
“The parties which have participated in the EC’s EVM challenge programme are only acting as observers. No political party has actually taken active participation in the event,” Bharadwaj claimed.
Denying that they had backtracked from their earlier announcement, the AAP leaders accused the media for drawing its own conclusions. “We never said that we will hold EVM challenge on June 3. We only said that we only launch the challenge from Saturday, which we have done,” a senior AAP leader said.