BJP bagged a thumping majority in Madhya Pradesh elections. Where party won 163 seats, while Congress was left consoling itself with meagre 66 seats. Recently ex-cm Kamalanatha has made shocking remarks regarding EVM Being rigged, Kamalnath exclaims “some MLA’s have complained about getting as low as 50 votes from their native villages”. Notably it is not new for opposition parties to make such claims after election defeat.
First Electronic voting machine of India was invented in 1980 by MB Haneefa. EVMs were firstly used in year 1981 During By-elections in Kerala. The modern day EVMs were designed by faculty members at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 1989. 2004 Lok Sabha were conducted entirely By EVMs.
A research paper titled 'India's Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs): Social construction of a "frugal" innovation' noted, "EVMs in India are unique and quite different from EVMs employed in other nations like the US. Rather than large, expensive, complex and computer like systems the Indian machine is praised for its simplicity, inexpensiveness, and efficiency. It should be noted that, at times EVMs have malfunctioned and had to be replaced. But there has not been a single proven instance of EVM being hacked.
A new generation of EVMs was developed in 2011 with a feature for Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). VVPAT machines are used during election process to verify that the vote polled by a voter goes to the correct candidate. VVPATs are a second line of verification particularly and are particularly useful in the time when allegations around Electronic Voting Machines' tampering crop up. However, ECI has not conceded to any allegations of hackability of EVM machines.
