After much hullaballoo over the alleged EVM tampering issue by about 13 political parties, the matter has come to an end with the Election Commission of India conducting the EVM challenge to any party that can hack into the electronic voting machines. During the actual day of the challenge almost all the parties that had earlier alleged that EVMs can be tampered with opted out of the challenge except for two but they too opted out of the dare. The ECI maintains that the EVMs are “non-tamperable” and with the new feature added for paper trail in all future elections, the question of EVMs being tampered with will not arise.
The NCP was one of the parties that attended the event not satisfied with the EVMs that were used by the state election commission during the municipality elections in Maharastra. This was again clarified by the ECI that the machines used by the SEC were not ECI machines. All machines are hackable in some way or other. Even in the United States, there were allegations of hacking into the link between the servers and the voting machines during elections. The case of ‘man in the middle’ was alleged by many that caused unexpected results in favour of former president Bush. However, in the case of India the EVMs are standalones and the amount of security measures that the manufacturers, Bharat Electronics Limited, employs in the making of EVMs conform to various international standards. Now with the latest announcement of paper trail in all future elections, it puts to rest the doubts over the integrity of the machines. As for BEL, it already has prospective buyers from abroad interested in the electronic voting machines that it manufactures.
It is therefore still not understood why was such a ruckus created by the political parties over the alleged tampering of EVMs especially after the BJP’s landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh. It now instead sounds just like a case of ‘sour grapes’. In a country as diverse as India there are various different factors that come in to play during elections. Moreover, it is becoming more and more complex with every successive election. There is caste politics, tribal politics and other communal politics including religion that comes into play during elections. The use of gifts, alcohol and money to lure voters is quite prevalent especially among the lower sections of the society. All these had led to an electorate that is becoming more and more difficult to predict. The majority of pollsters getting wrong conclusions is an indicator of such a scenario in the country. It can be concluded that it is not the machines but it is the electorate whose integrity needs to be questioned.
