Election Commission advised to hold ‘hackathon’ to reward hackers

In an interview to The Indian Express, a techie Hari K Prasad, who had challenged the EVMs in 2009 and was arrested in 2010 for allegedly stealing an EVM after he demonstrated how the machine could be hacked, reiterated his stand. In 2009, he was stopped by EC after 15 minutes, he alleged.

Stating that any electronic machine could be hacked, Prasad said that the Election Commission was again making a mistake by challenging people to prove that the machines can be tampered. No criminal, he said, was likely to come forward to show how he commits the crime.

Having said that, he put the following posers to the EC :

• Is the Election Commission sure that no EVM has ever been taken out or stolen from its warehouses?
• If the EC is confident that EVMs are tamper-proof, why doesn’t it release the video it recorded in 2009 when it had challenged people to prove that EVMs could be tampered?
• How is EC so confident that it can stop collusion between officials engaged in conducting the election and officials pushing the government’s agenda?
• Instead of throwing a challenge to the sceptics, why is the EC not organising a ‘hackathon’ to reward people who can show up loopholes in the machine?

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court on Tuesday sought the Election Commission’s response by April 21 to Aam Aadmi Party’s prayer for direction to use only second generation EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) in the Delhi Municipal Corporation election to be held on Sunday.

The Bench observed that nothing could be done at the eleventh hour and the court was not in a position to put off the election either. The Election Commission’s counsel, however, informed the court that the same set of EVMs which were used in the Delhi assembly election in 2015 are going to be used on Sunday.

Aam Aadmi Party, however, claimed that the EC was moving EVMs from Rajasthan and would be using old, first generation machines prone to malfunctioning.