BJP Tampering EVM Assam

With the 16th Lok Sabha elections in less than a week now, political controversies are reaching new heights. In a recent story break out by TOI, a case of tampering electronic voting machine (EVM) has come up while performing a mock poll drill in Johrat, Assam. According to the story, every time a button was pressed, the vote went in favour of BJP. This has led to an emergence of another political controversy offline as well as online.

State chief electoral officer Vijyandra said, “An EVM in Jorhat was found malfunctioning yesterday. It is a defective machine and it was noticed when EVMs were readied in front of representatives of all political parties. We will not send the faulty unit to any polling station.”

An EVM consists of two units, a control unit and a balloting unit. Both units are connected with cable. The balloting unit is a small box-like device, on top of which each candidate and his or her election symbol appears. The voter selects his candidate by pressing the blue button.

Congress Committee general secretary Ranjan Bora has already lodged a complaint with the Election Commission of India and demanded thorough inspection of all EVMs in not just Jorhat, but the entire state. He further stated that the incident has fueled suspicion in their minds that EVMs may have been tampered to favour a particular political party.

The faulty EVM has opened up a Pandora’s Box on whether EVM can be tampered with or not, with the Lok Sabha elections standing right next to the door.

It also goes without saying that the whole controversy has been taken forward to Twitter by AAP and Congress party supporters, who are now blaming the BJP and Narendra Modi for possible EVM tampering.

Hashtag #BJPRiggedEVM has been trending at the top of India Twitter Trends from the early part of the day. Some of the tweets that are making the buzz are listed below:

https://twitter.com/sharmarohit_/statuses/451668378118156288

https://twitter.com/Shajan_G/statuses/451597627097096192

Recently Twitter witnessed another war on April Fools’ Day and #BJPRiggedEVM is one more addition to the growing list of Twitter fights between political parties. We are going to see more drama in the coming days.

Image credit: NDTV