Kalburgi: With doubts surfacing over the credibility of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) after Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh Assembly poll results, Karnataka Minister for Information Technology and Bio-Technology (IT & BT) Priyank Kharge urged the Election Commission of India (EC) to have an ‘EVM Hackathon’ to effectively test the credibility of the machines.
Speaking to reporters at Kalburgi on December 19, he said, “After questions were raised over the infallibility and credibility of EVMs after Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, the EC had thrown a hackathon challenge to counter allegations of EVM tampering restricting the exercise to political parties. Let a hackathon be organised under the ECs scanner itself, throwing the challenge open to the public, reputed companies, start-ups and even individual experts.”
Such transparent exercise giving the hackathon participants a time frame of minimum one month would lead to fixing loopholes in the existing machines. The hackathon would the aid development of foolproof advanced machines, Kharge opined, while stating that political parties alone are less competent to assess the EVM credibility on their own.
The minister also said that he would write to EC on December 20 in this connection as the chief minister had already given nod.
Meanwhile, Kharge clarified that that he was neither against the use of technology in election process nor was he opposed to the use of EVMs.
