Amid a raging debate over the reliability of EVMs, the Election Commission will meet representatives of 55 political parties on Friday to put forth its stand on the issue. The AAP will send a three-member delegation of computer experts led by Bharadwaj, a computer engineer.
Sacked Delhi water minister Kapil Mishra on Wednesday began his indefinite hunger strike at his residence and threatened not to eat anything till Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal reveals who funded foreign trips of five AAP leaders in the last two years. He had used a lookalike machine and used some secret codes to show that EVMs can be tampered. "Let us see what is the outcome of this meeting", he added.
The EC, however, has said that it hasn't backed out, and had accepted the AAP's demand of being given a machine. "This is done during the mock test", Bhardwaj said.
Leaders of other parties like the CPI, RJD and RLD raised related as well as other aspects of the electoral process like corporate funding.
The EC said it is "common sense" that gadgets other than ECI-EVMs can be programmed to perform in a pre-determined way, but it simply cannot be implied that ECI-EVMs will behave in the same manner because the ECI-EVMs are technically secured and function under an elaborate administrative and security protocol.
The EC is likely to seek suggestions for its proposed "EVM challenge", which will provide a chance to those doubting Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to prove that these can be tampered with.
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All the seven national and 35 of the 48 state recognised political parties are attending the meeting. "With this demonstration, it has been proved that EVMs can actually be hacked", Bhardwaj said. The party had used an EVM prototype to make the demonstration.
However, the poll panel had rubbished aside his claims saying that the machine used by Bharadwaj was a "lookalike" of the EC's EVM and therefore could not be used to establish any evidence or possible tampering. The Delhi Assembly passed a resolution on Tuesday appealing to the President and the EC to compulsorily use Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail machines in every election and also count VVPAT slips in one out of every four booths in each constituency.
"EVM manipulation is a real possibility and should be looked into immediately", said RK Gupta, an AAP worker who had come from Dwarka in south-west Delhi to the poll panel's central Delhi headquarters.
Opposition parties will, in all likelihood, again tell the Election Commission of India about their "loss of faith" in EVMs and to ensure trustworthy mechanism for polling, when an all-party meeting on the issue is held in New Delhi on Friday.
Also on the agenda is making bribery in elections a cognisable offence and disqualification of a candidate on framing of charges for the offence of bribery in elections.
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