Chief Election Commissioner Achal Kumar Joti said on Monday that no electronic voting machines, or EVMs, were tampered with during the Gujarat Assembly elections, ANI reported.
Joti said that questions raised about the tampering of EVMs had already been answered. He added that the use of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails enabled voters to see who they had voted for.
“All arrangements have been made in Gujarat by the chief electoral officer of the state in view of the counting,” Joti said before the counting began on Monday. As the day progressed, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party looked headed for a victory in Gujarat.
Patidar leader Hardik Patel had on Sunday alleged that 140 software engineers from an Ahmedabad-based company had been hired to hack about 5,000 Electronic Voting Machines, or EVMs, using their source cards.
He followed up this claim with a tweet in which he alleged that attempts had been made to hack the machines used in tribal and Patel-dominated areas such as Visnagar, Tankara, Radhanpur, Vav, Jetpur and Savli. “People will laugh off my claims, but if a divine creation such as the human body can be tampered with, an EVM can also be hacked. ATMs can be hacked, why not EVMs?” he asked.
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