Meghalaya: East Garo administration issues public notice urging people to refrain from spreading 'misinformation' about EVMs

Meghalaya’s East Garo Hills Deputy Commissioner Swapnil Tembe has urged people not to spread misinformation about EVMs as the state gears up for the upcoming Assembly polls.

East Garo Hills DC while taking cognizance of a video that went viral where it purportedly showed that any button pressed on an EVM leads to a vote in favour of BJP, issued a public notice in this regard.

The East Garo Hill DC termed the reports about EVMs being rigged as ‘false and baseless’.

The EVMs are highly secured devices that are subjected to a number of checks to prevent such an incident. DC Tembe stated, "They are constructed, repaired, and always stored in secure locations."

He went on to say that, in accordance with the procedure established by the Election Commission of India (ECI), the EVMs are subjected to four stages of inspection during their creation in order to rule out any errors.

“In the weeks leading up to the elections, large-scale demonstrations of electronic voting machines (EVMs) were held in all constituencies and on the streets so that people could get a feel for how the voting process works. In EVMs, the microchips are one-time programmable or masked chips that cannot be read or changed. Therefore, the EVM program cannot be reprogrammed in a particular way," he stated.

The DC added that because the EVMs are standalone machines that cannot be accessed remotely from any network connected to any external device and do not include operating systems, it is impossible to program them to select a specific candidate or political party.
Defective machines are removed from the stock after being checked, machines are randomly assigned to constituencies and polling stations through software multiple times, mock poles are run during commissioning, and mock poles are run on the EVMs in all polling stations one hour before the start of the poll to make sure there are no errors or objections. All four stages of the check are done in the presence of political party representatives and candidates.

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