New Delhi: The Delhi Vidhan Sabha saw a well planned and orchestrated session where first the Speaker allowed discussion on the subject of EVM tampering and then Aam Aadmi Party MLA, Saurabh Bharadwaj, who was a technocrat by profession before getting elected as an MLA, brought prototype of an actual EVM machine into the House and gave live demonstration of how an Electronic Voting Machine that was working perfectly legitimately can be fed a code that will make it ‘malfunction’ to deliberately favour a given candidate.
Bharadwaj first showed a rapt House what an EVM machine consists of ( two units, one for casting votes and the other for doing the actual assimilation, or counting and which is placed in front of the polling officer); then he showed demo. of how the machine works by pressing buttons in front of 5 main political parties and then using the other machine to show ‘results’.
To begin with, the EVM worked perfectly as it should.
“This is the demo given to candidates and party representatives in the morning” pointed out Saurabh Bharadwaj.
“Then at around 10 a.m. when period of peak voting begins, a citizen who has ostensibly come to cast his votes, is actually sent to tamper with the voting machine by entering a brief code.
The process is very simple and takes just a few seconds. There is a 7 digit number he has to enter by pressing on candidate buttons.
Even the polling officer may remain unaware that this is being done since the voting area is secluded and private.
But once the code is pressed, the voter gets the illusion that his vote has gone to proper candidate, because the light in front of that candidate’s name will be lit, but all votes will be cast for a particular candidate by machine number 2. Which the saboteur hasn’t even touched!
This point Bharadwaj demonstrated by showing 10 AAP votes being ‘diverted’ to BJP.
Then he turned to the two BJP, MLAs present in the House and said “you have won. Yoy may begin dancing now!!” To which the two took objection and chaos ensued in the house for some time.
At the outset too, one BJP MLA tried his best to keep on intervening and not letting the topic of EVM tampering being brought for discussion. The Speaker was very patient with him for a long time but had to finally ask Marshals to remove him from the House.
After this, law maker Alka Lamba spoke on the issue.
She emphasized that her party was bringing in this topic for discussion in the House not to generate publicity and defame BJP, but so that it will go on record of Parliament.
She alleged that earlier when two scientists working for a PSU had also declared that EVMs can be tampered with they were suspended and gagged from speaking.
Saurabh has done under- graduation in Computer Science and has worked for over a decade in micro processing and Assembly Line Programming.
He said though he was out of the field for 4 years now, and wasn’t updated on latest in the field of computers and software it was still easy for him to write a program tampering with working of EVMs.
The result of which he put before the House today.
Leaders of other political parties like RJD and CPI (M) were invited to be present in the House when this demo. was made.
