ECIL chairman assures EVMs cannot be tampered

HYDERABAD: On Tuesday, the former chairman and managing director Potluri Sudhakar of Electronics Corporation of India Limited had said that, fears of electronic voting machines (EVMs) being tampered with the ongoing general elections, EVMs and VVPATs were unhackable and tamper proof.

Sudhakar, who had worked as CMD of ECIL from 2013 to 2015 said the programming for EVMs and VVPATs was being done at a secure manufacturing facility in ECIL and BEL. "EVMs are standalone machines and are not connected to any network. The machine has no internet interface so the question of hacking externally doesn't arise," the former CMD of ECIL said at Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers in Hyderabad.

Neither EVMs nor VVPATs have radio frequency transmission device features and hence can't receive signals from the outside. The devices cannot be reprogrammed. "The control Unit has a real-time clock that logs every event on it right from the time it was switched on. At the secure manufacturing facility, operations are logged electronically so that all events can be traced easily. Apart from this, physical security is four levels and nobody can enter the electronic voting machines manufacturing facility where the programming is done unless they pass through a series of security measures," said Sudhakar.

"Only two manufacturers -- ECIL and BEL - are involved in the manufacture of EVMs," he added.