The Electronic Voting Machines in India are a “black box” that nobody is allowed to scrutinise, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Sunday.
Gandhi said that “serious concerns” were being raised about the transparency in the country’s electoral process. “Democracy ends up becoming a sham and prone to fraud when institutions lack accountability,” Gandhi said in a social media post.
The Congress leader’s comments were in reference to a newspaper report about an alleged incident at a vote counting centre in the Mumbai North-West parliamentary constituency.
The Mumbai Police have filed a case against the brother-in-law of newly-elected Mumbai North-West MP Ravindra Waikar for allegedly taking a mobile phone to a counting centre on the day of the Lok Sabha election results, The Indian Express reported. Waikar won the seat by 48 votes, in what was the closest contest in the 2024 general elections.
Gandhi made the comments while responding to a post by billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X.
“We should eliminate electronic voting machines,” Musk had said in his post on Saturday. “The risk of being hacked by humans or AI [artificial intelligence], while small, is still too high.”
Musk’s post was in reference to allegations of voting irregularities related to Electronic Voting Machines at a primary election in the United States’ Puerto Rico.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Rajeev Chandrashekhar also responded to Musk’s statement on Sunday, calling it “a huge sweeping generalisation”.
Electronic Voting Machines in India are “custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media”, Chandrashekhar, the former Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, said.
“Anything can be hacked,” Musk responded to Chandrashekhar’s comment.
While Opposition parties has for long raised concerns about the use of Electronic Voting Machines, the Election Commission has rejected the allegations that the voting machines can be tampered with.
Watch: Indian elections: How secure is the EVM-VVPAT process?
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