The interview of Syed Shuja, live streamed from London, sent the India media on a tailspin on that day
He narrated that his team was engaged by ECIL to break the security and develop a device to communicate with existing EVMs and change the results.
Shuja claimed the EVM hacking technology has also reached the Americans who, as he in his interview says, verified his claims for two years before giving him an asylum.
He claimed categorically one may safely conclude that the team successfully made a remote controlled device, which could be used for hacking the machine.
He did not say at any time that they had to add any component to the existing EVM for using low frequency radio waves.
But What he claimed was that using the remote device his team altered the results of Delhi, Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh elections.
It is to be noted earlier in 2003, in Belgium, an EVM machine was found giving erroneous results. The machine had added such a large number of votes in favour of a candidate that it exceeded the total number of votes polled.
A thorough scientific investigation was carried out and it was found that an alien cosmic particle had hit the chip and altered the result.
This effect is technically called ‘single-event upset’ (or SEU). In Belgium this could happen, one machine gave erroneous results and a thorough independent scientific investigation was conducted and its findings were made public.
However Indian Media reports and critiques which followed his claims have basically argued that this cannot be achieved without making changes to the EVM and installing an antenna to the machines.
With Shuja’s claims we not got two options .
First is to reject the story, throw it in the dustbin, go home and sleep.
The next one is to appoint a team of independent experts, give them the same EVM which Shuja claims to have hacked, and ask them to ‘jailbreak’ it.
Here it is important to discuss in an unprecedented exercise in Delhi Legislative Assembly during 2017 , where Aam Aadmi Party MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj, who is an engineer by training, demonstrated how an Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) is rigged to benefit a certain party during elections.
During his demonstration, Bhardwaj said that an EVM can be rigged by replacing its motherboard and this can be done in 90 seconds.
Bhardwaj also said that separate codes are needed to be fed in EVMs, whose motherboards were replaced earlier, at each booth on the say of the voting. Earlier during UPA era both BJP leader Advani and Present BJP MP Saubramaniya swamy has alleged EVM tampering
Post UP Elections where BJP has secured 2/3rd majority in Delhi assembly demonstration on EVM hacking been done
Aftermath the mega rally organised int this month by West Bengal CM and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee in Kolkata last Saturday, a four-member committee of opposition leaders has been formed to evaluate the functioning of EVMs. The committee features the Congress’ Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, Bahujan Samaj Party’s Satish Chandra Mishra and Delhi CM and AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal.
As of now, 31 countries used or studied EVMs. But only 4 use it nationwide, 11 use EVMs in some parts. Pilots are on in 5 nations. Three nations have discontinued it while 11, which ran pilots, decided against electronic voting
Time has come to evaluate ourselves and It is prime duty of the Election Commission of India to protect our democracy
