EVM Fraud Reported in Delhi Election to Help BJP Win
As most voters emphatically demand all Indian elections to be conducted on paper ballots, it is said that for the fear of being caught BJP is manipulating EVMs selectively in crucial constituencies.
By Rakesh Raman
As the Delhi Assembly election took place Saturday (February 8), a large-scale fraud in the electronic voting machines (EVMs) has been reported. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) claims that the EVMs are being tampered with to help Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of PM Narendra Modi win.
A number of AAP leaders are reporting EVM fraud that will lead to BJP’s victory. An AAP leader Gopal Rai claimed that instead of sending the EVMs to strongroom after the polling, an official was found in possession of the machine which can be misused to change the vote count. He asked the election authorities to take immediate action.
Besides AAP and BJP, Congress is also in the fray. But the main contest was between AAP and BJP, as Congress is a dying political party which is just waiting for its extinction.
हमारी विधानसभा बाबरपुर में वोटिंग खत्म होने पर सभी EVM मशीन स्ट्रांग रूम भेज दी गई उसके बाद सरस्वती विद्या निकेतन पोलिंग स्टेशन पर एक अधिकारी EVM के साथ पकड़ा गया है । मैं इलेक्शन कमिसन से अपील करता हूँ की इस पर तुरंत करवाई किया जाए।@ECISVEEP pic.twitter.com/e1qlE98Ia0
— Gopal Rai (@AapKaGopalRai) February 8, 2020
Most exit polls – before the declaration of results on February 11 – show that chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP will retain the government by winning around 50 of the 70 Assembly seats.
However, BJP’s Delhi unit head Manoj Tiwari asserted after the polls that his party will win 48 seats, while 36 seats are needed to win the election. He also said that EVMs should not be blamed for BJP’s victory.
ये सभी एग्ज़िट पोल होंगे fail..
मेरी ये ट्वीट सम्भाल के रखियेगा..
भाजपा दिल्ली में ४८ सीट ले कर सरकार बनायेगी .. कृपया EVM को दोष देने का अभी से बहाना ना ढूँढे..🙏— Manoj Tiwari (@ManojTiwariMP) February 8, 2020
It is largely believed that Modi’s party BJP wins most elections by tampering with EVMs in collusion with the Election Commission of India (ECI) which is a government-controlled outfit. The ECI has repeatedly rejected the demands of holding elections on ballot papers.
[ Also Read: Death of Democracy and Rise of Kakistocracy in India ]
Although large-scale tampering of EVMs was reported in the recent Lok Sabha election that Modi and BJP won, ECI refused to conduct any investigation into the alleged EVM fraud.
The field reports suggest that without EVM manipulations, BJP would not have won even 100 Lok Sabha seats. But with EVM fraud, Modi’s party managed to win 303 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats.
The opposition parties were vociferously opposing the use of EVMs before the election with allegations that BJP colludes with the ECI to tamper with the voting machines and win elections deceptively. But when the election results were declared in May 2019 and BJP won, all opposition parties went into a state of stony silence and did not challenge the results.
In November 2019, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) – a leading election research organization in India – had filed a petition in the Supreme Court regarding flaws in using EVMs in Indian election.
The petition urged the court to direct the ECI to conduct actual and accurate reconciliation of (votes) data before the declaration of the final result of any election. It also appealed for an investigation into all such discrepancies in the data related to the 2019 Lok Sabha election results.
According to the petition, the discrepancies have been found in the 347 of the 542 constituencies where the 2019 Lok Sabha election took place. It adds that the difference in vote count ranges from 1 vote to over 100,000 votes.
Research Paper on EVMs
You can click here to download the following research paper.
Research Paper: Attack of the Machines on Democracy In India
How EVMs Are Manipulated to Win Elections
However, the Supreme Court could not do anything to get the alleged EVM fraud investigated in a transparent manner and elections continue to happen on EVMs that mostly favor BJP.
Tech experts suggest that besides other manipulations, the chip used in the EVMs is not of OTP (One Time Programmable) category. That means, it can be programmed in each EVM to change the vote count in favor of a particular candidate.
As most voters emphatically demand all Indian elections to be conducted on paper ballots, it is said that for the fear of being caught BJP is manipulating EVMs selectively in crucial constituencies. But if BJP won the Delhi election on February 11, it will be alleged that Modi’s party once again stole the election brazenly.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of a humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society. He also creates and publishes a number of digital publications and research reports on different subjects.
