Rahul Gandhi says EVMs in India ‘black box’, no one allowed to scrutinise them

New Delhi: Asserting that "serious concerns" are being raised over transparency in India's electoral process, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi claimed on June 16 that EVMs in the country are a "black box" that no one is permitted to examine.

Asserting that "serious concerns" are being raised over transparency in India's voting process, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi claimed on June 16 that EVMs in the country are a "black box" that no one is permitted to examine.

“Democracy ends up becoming a sham and prone to fraud when institutions lack accountability,” Mr Gandhi said and tagged a media report which claimed that a relative of Shiv Sena’s candidate, who won the polls from Mumbai’s northwest by 48 votes, had a phone that unlocks an EVM, PTI reported.

The former Congress president also tagged the post on X by Elon Musk in which he talked about eliminating EVMs.

“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” Mr Musk said in his post.

The Opposition parties have been raising concerns over EVMs for some time now and had demanded a 100% count of the VVPAT slips which was not allowed.

Chandrasekhar argues on EVM security

Earlier in the day, former Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar got into a brief dispute with X and Tesla, Inc. founder and CEO Elon Musk over the security of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

Mr Chandrasekhar responded that these concerns didn’t apply to Indian voting machines, to which Mr Musk replied, “Anything can be hacked”.