Elon Musk to Rahul Gandhi. Who said what on EVM ‘unlocking’ political row? 10 Points
Rahul Gandhi said serious concerns about transparency in the country's electoral process are being raised even as the Election Commission rejected the tampering claim.The poll panel said that EVM is a stand-alone device with ‘robust’ administrative safeguards to protect it from manipulation.The row erupted after Mid-Day newspaper published in its report that a relative of Ravindra Waikar, the winning Shiv Sena candidate from Mumbai North West Lok Sabha constituency was allegedly found using a mobile phone "connected" to an EVM during the counting of votes on June 4. Waikar won the election by 48 votes.The report claimed that Waikar’s brother-in-law Mangesh Pandilkar, had used a mobile phone to “unlock" an EVM when the votes were being counted.
Quoting police, the report said that the mobile phone was used for generating the OTP that unlocked the EVM machine.Pandilkar and a polling official Dinesh Gurav have been booked by the Vanrai Police under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code for flouting the poll panel’s ban on mobile phones inside counting centres.Vandana Suryavanshi, the returning officer of the seat, has rubbished the allegations. At a press conference on June 16, she said notices had been issued to Mid-Day and Marathi daily Lokmat for publishing ‘false’ news.
She said that the EVM is a standalone system, not programmable and has no wireless communication capabilities.Even Mumbai police terming the media reports as fake and baseless and said that no such information (about a mobile phone being used to generate OTP to unlock EVM) was given by any official. Suryavanshi however said the personal mobile phone of one Dinesh Gurav, the data entry operator of Jogeshwari assembly constituency, was found in the hands of
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