NEW DELHI, June 3 (Xinhua) -- India's election commission Saturday organized a challenge for hacking its electronic voting machines (EVMs), officials said.
The challenge began at 10:00 a.m. local time in New Delhi.
"Today's challenge will end at 2:00 p.m. (local time) and the challengers will get four hours each to tamper with the EVM machines," a commission official said.
According to officials, only two political parties, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) have shown willingness to participate in the challenge.
The Commission has brought 14 EVMs for the Saturday's challenge from its strong rooms in northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand, where local elections were held recently.
The challenge was organized after several major opposition parties had claimed the machines could be tampered easily.
Last month, India's anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) claimed EVMs are susceptible to tampering. A lawmaker of AAP Sourabh Bhardwaj gave a demonstration of EVM tampering inside Delhi Assembly (lawmaking body) during a one-day special session.
However, India's Election Commission has rubbished claims of AAP, saying their EVMs are technically secured and function under an elaborate administrative and security protocol.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal challenged Election Commission that he can change the motherboard of EVM in 90 seconds.
However, in the scheduled challenge neither AAP nor Congress party are participating, but only raised some issues with the existing framework of challenge.
AAP, however, has planned to organize its own EVM challenge to show that EVMs can be tampered.
