EVMs can neither be hacked nor tampered with, ECI tells SC
The HinduThe Election Commission of India has assured the Supreme Court that Electronic Voting Machines can neither be hacked nor tampered with. In an affidavit spanning over 450 pages, the EC said EVMs are “totally stand-alone machines having one-time programmable chips”. “The existing VVPAT enables electors to check whether their votes have gone to the candidate of their choice… Further there is a provision for mandatory verification of printed VVPAT slips from five randomly selected polling stations of each Assembly constituency/segment, which is the audit of the electronic vote before the results,” the EC said. The EC said counting of 100% VVPAT slips would pose a “great difficulty”. The EC was responding to a petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, which sought a direction to cross-verify the vote count in EVMs with votes “recorded as cast” in the VVPAT.