Election Commission will not be 'bullied, intimidated' into going back to ballot papers: CEC

Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora has said — categorically — that the Election Commission is going to continue to use electronic voting machines. He added that they would not be "bullied" or "intimidated" into using ballot papers.

Arora made his comments at an event in Delhi.

"I would like to make it very clear that we are not going back to the era of ballot papers," he said.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

"We will continue to use EVMs (electronic voting machines) and VVPATs (voter-verified paper audit trail," he added.

"We are open to any criticism and feedback from any stakeholder including political parties. At the same time, we are not going to be intimidated, bullied or coerced into giving up these and start era of ballot papers," Arora said.

There has been a long history of criticism of EVMs in India, especially so since the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014. (The criticism however has never been backed up by solid proof.)

In 2017, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had dared the Election Commission to give him any EVM, saying he would hack it in 90 seconds.

And only this week, a self-proclaimed cyber expert, Syed Shuja, called a hackathon in London.

Shuja made a series of sensational claims in London, including that EVMs were hacked in the 2014 general elections and thatsenior BJP leader Gopinath Munde was "murdered" before he could expose the alleged crime.

The BJP has said the hackathon was sponsored by the Congress since party leader Kapil Sibal had attended it.

Despite the lack of proof offered by Shuja, a number of leaders including the BSP's Mayawati, the SP's Akhilesh Yadav, and the TDP's N Chandrababu Naidu have called for the junking of the EVMs and a return to ballot papers.