Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday once again raised EVM (electronic voting machines (EVMs)) hours after billionaire tech magnate Elon Musk’s statement on EVMs.
“EVMs in India are a “black box,” and nobody is allowed to scrutinize them. Serious concerns are being raised about transparency in our electoral process. Democracy ends up becoming a sham and prone to fraud when institutions lack accountability,” Gandhi posted on X.
Gandhi tagged a media report which claimed that a relative of Shiv Sena’s candidate, who won the polls from Mumbai’s north west by 48 votes, had a phone that unlocks an EVM.
The former Congress president also tagged the post on X by Elon Musk in which he talked about eliminating EVMs.
“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” Musk had said in his post.
Former Union Minister hits back at Musk
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, former Minister of State for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in Modi Cabinet 2.0, hit back at X owner, saying Indian EVMs are custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media – No connectivity, no bluetooth, wifi, Internet.
“This is a huge sweeping generalization statement that implies no one can build secure digital hardware. Wrong. @elonmusk’s view may apply to US n other places – where they use regular compute platforms to build Internet connected Voting machines. But Indian EVMs are custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media – No connectivity, no bluetooth, wifi, Internet. ie there is no way in. Factory programmed controllers that cannot be reprogrammed. Electronic voting machines can be architected and built right as India has done. We wud be happy to run a tutorial Elon,” the former Union minister said in his post.