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Months ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, a self-proclaimed US-based cyber expert Syed Shuja has claimed that the “entire” 2014 polls were “rigged” at the Electronic Voting Machine( EVM) hackathon in London. That “revelation” made top headlines and the opposition parties felt vindicated by the accusations of EVM rigging in 2014. The opposition parties( including BJP while it was in the opposition) have questioned the EVMs after their losses. Thus for those political parties who don’t want EVMs the “revelations” by Syed Shuja may seem to be like a redemption for their disastrous defeat. What had fuelled suspicions some years ago about manipulation came from bad losers who speculated without substantiating their allegations. They went as far as to allege the so-called “trojan horse sub programme” was loaded to the machines for the manipulation. The allegation was that the software would be wilfully activated after knowing the key number allocation to favour a particular candidate. By knowing the key number, it was alleged that the software(Trojan Horse) would be activated through some mechanism(mobile etc) at the time of poll. It was also speculated that there were other ways by which EVMs could be manipulated. This could be done by deletion of entire data or the software to register votes adjusted and the election results manipulated to suit particular candidate(s) by expert hackers. This can be possible if there is no adequate transparency, such as paper trail which would open EVMs vulnerable to manipulation. Those who have questioned the reliability of EVMs are those who have lost elections. After 2004 election the BJP raised hue and cry over the reliability of EVMs. The cry became more hoarse after BJP again lost the 2009 election. Tests were conducted and there was no conclusive proof that EVMs could be doctored\/manipulated whereby pushing any button would lead to voting only for a particular party and rejecting others. It may be pointed that during the period 2009 when the BJP raised the issue, the Election Commissioner of India was N.Gopalaswamy, considered pro-BJP man and during whose tenure the 2004 Lok Sabha election was conducted. In 2009, BJP blamed its loss on EVMs and accused the Congress of tampering. Then in 2014, it became the turn of the Congress to raise hue and cry after the losses in several states. However, after 2014 it was the turn of Congress to question the reliability of the EVMs. By that yardstick, Congress should remind itself that it had won Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh from BJP at the polls where EVMs were used. In order to ensure greater trust, the ECI installed the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) which allows voters the possibility to verify that their votes are cast as intended. This way, the VVPAT can serve as an additional barrier to changing or destroying votes. Now the London EVM hackathon as it were, was a dubious and desperate attempt that was meant to destroy the reputation of EVMs and raise the spectre of a plan to rig the 2019 polls. The dubiousness was amplified when the accuser-Syed Shuja- did not show up at the event but did a video conferencing only to hurl hilarious murder conspiracies. However, he did not demonstrate how EVMs could be hacked ; which was supposed to be the main highlight of the London hackathon. Hopefully, the FIR filed by ECI and legal actions against Shuja should expose the shadiness of the entire episode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shady charge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}