Weeks after poll results, slugfest over EVMs

Vandana Suryavansbi, returning officer of the constituency, said a defamation notice bas been issued to the Mid-Day daily.

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A fresh political slugfest erupted on Sunday over EVM tampering claims with Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders citing a media report that alleged that a relative of the Shiv Sena candidate in Mumbai North West Lok Sabha constituency was found using a mobile phone “connected” to an electronic voting machine during the counting of votes on June 4.

However, Vandana Suryavanshi, returning officer of the constituency, dismissed the report in ‘mid-day’ newspaper as “false news” and said a defamation notice has been issued to the publication. She asserted that the EVM is a standalone system, not programmable and has no wireless communication capabilities.

The BJP hit out at the opposition leaders over the issue and demanded that the Election Commission should prosecute all those who "amplified the lie" by sharing the news report.

Questioning the reliability of EVMs, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi and others on Sunday also quoted a post by Elon Musk, chairman of social media platform X and CEO of Tesla, in which he talked about eliminating EVMs and claimed the risk of hacking was "too high".

"We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” Musk said while responding to a post by US politician Robert F Kennedy Jr alleging Puerto Rico’s primary elections experienced “hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines”.