New Delhi: Seven hours after a meeting between Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora over alleged EVM malfunction in Andhra Pradesh, tensions between the Telugu Desum Party (TDP) and the poll panel peaked.
Naidu had arrived at the Election Commission’s New Delhi office Saturday, two days after Andhra Pradesh voted for its 175 assembly and 25 Lok Sabha seats on 11 April amid reports of EVM glitches.
Naidu’s delegation included an e-voting researcher who was jailed in 2010 for stealing an EVM to demonstrate its alleged fallibility, and the Election Commission (EC) was not pleased.
While Naidu told the media that the EC was working at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the poll panel Saturday shot off a letter to the TDP over Hari K. Prasad Vemuru’s inclusion in its delegation.
The TDP, however, vouched for Prasad’s credibility, and asked the commission to not “avoid addressing the situation”.
‘EC shooting the whistleblower’
Prasad, who calls himself “a friend of Chandrababu Naidu and a TDP sympathiser”, is a researcher involved in identifying “flaws” in India’s paperless voting machines.
He was arrested in Mumbai in August 2010 for stealing an EVM, and kept in custody for eight days.
In April 2010, he had told the media that he had gained access to a working EVM used in Indian elections through “an anonymous source”. Accompanied by his team, he then went on to demonstrate how an EVM could be manipulated to sway the outcome of an election.
According to some reports, Prasad had gained access to the EVM through someone from the Election Commission itself. Getting hold of the EVM qualified as possession of stolen property under the IPC, which is why Prasad was arrested.
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The case in India notwithstanding, Prasad went on to receive the Pioneer Award from US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a renowned civil liberties group.
“He has endured jail time, repeated interrogations, and ongoing political harassment to protect an anonymous source that enabled him to conduct the first independent security review of India’s electronic voting system,” the EFF had said.
Talking to ThePrint about the EC’s objection to his presence in the TDP delegation, Prasad said the “EC is just shooting the whistleblower”.
“They refuse to engage with me because they call me a criminal…How can they say that? I will take them to court,” he added.
“Former chief election commissioners S.Y. Quraishi and V.S. Sampath both invited me to talk after the case [that led to his arrest],” he said. “But they say they don’t want to talk to me, on the basis of an eight-year-old case in which no chargesheet was filed,” he added.
The TDP delegation went to the EC in good faith, Prasad said. But after deputy election commissioner Sudeep Jain refused to engage with him, Prasad said the EC was being “vindictive and derogatory”.
Prasad wanted to discuss why VVPAT slips in Andhra Pradesh were appearing only for three seconds, as opposed to the standard seven seconds. While Chief Election Commissioner Arora suggested that Prasad meet the head of the commission’s technical expert committee along with Jain to discuss the matter, the latter refused to engage with him, he said.
Prasad, who calls Naidu his “mentor”, said he had known the Andhra CM closely since 2010, and advised him on technical matters.
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He now bats for a two-step verification process. The voter should be allowed to first cast a dummy vote, he says. Only when they are satisfied that the voter verified paper audit trail or VVPAT slip accurately reflects their vote, he argues, should they cast their actual vote.