Aam Aadmi Party to hold EVM challenge alongside EC on June 3

The Arvind Kejriwal-led-Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday said that it will hold a parallel and similar EVM challenge on June 3 alongside the Election Commission’s just to prove that the poll panel’s challenge was “pointless”. The AAP has decided not to contest the commission’s challenge after its request for a change in terms and conditions was shot down by the panel. AAP legislator Saurabh Bharadwaj, who earlier in the Delhi assembly had demonstrated hacking of an electronic voting machine using a prototype, said the party’s challenge will also have the same prototype. He said the whole idea behind the exercise was to demonstrate that the Election Commission challenge, because of its terms and conditions, was a “pointless exercise”. “Using Blue Tooth or any other device, the participants will have to prove that the EVMs have been tampered with, but they can’t open it,” said Bharadwaj, contending that it was not possible to prove tampering without opening the EVM and accessing the mother board. While the EC’s challenge is open only to national and state parties which contested assembly polls in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Goa and Punjab, Bharadwaj said the AAP’s challenge was open to all. The participants will have four hours to demonstrate that the EVMs provided to them have been tampered with.