NEW DELHI, June 1 (Xinhua) -- India's anti-graft Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has decided to skip the electronic voting machine (EVM) hackathon to be held in the national capital on Saturday.
AAP, led by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, has claimed that the hackathon rules are too restrictive and will instead hold its own hackathon on the same day to prove its point, highly-placed party sources said Thursday.
The Election Commission, the organizor, took the decision to hold the hackathon in the first week of June at an all-party meeting held last month, attended by representatives of 55 political outfits in India.
The all-party meeting was called amid a massive political debate in India, mainly raised by AAP, on whether EVMs can be rigged or not.
The Election Commission has asserted that EVMs cannot be manipulated, rejecting the allegations of AAP and several others, including regional Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), of widespread tampering of EVMs in the recent assembly elections in five states and Delhi civic polls.
Earlier last month, AAP lawmaker Saurabh Bharadwaj "hacked" a gadget that he said was "similar to an EVM" in a demonstration in the Delhi Assembly, but the Election Commission dismissed his assertion, saying that the machine used by Bharadwaj was a "lookalike" of an EVM.
India uses about 1.4 million EVMs in each general election to cover the vast country.
