Elon Musk had written on X "We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high," sharing a post by RobertF Kennedy Jr that had cited media reports about hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines in Puerto Rico's primary elections. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Former Minister of state for Electronics and IT, disagreed with Musk's opinion about EVMs, and argued that the latter's statement was a "huge sweeping generalisation".
“Wrong. @elonmusk’s view may apply to US and other places where they use regular compute platforms to build Internet connected voting machines … but Indian EVMs are custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media … Electronic voting machines can be architected and built right as India has done.” Chandrasekhar responded that these concerns didn’t apply to Indian voting machines, to which Musk replied, “Anything can be hacked”.
Chandrasekhar then conceded that while “any level of encryption” on a computer system can be broken with sufficient power, EVM integrity was “a different type of conversation,” adding “we can agree to disagree”.
The Supreme Court had, during the elections, refused to mandate the Election Commission of India to manually count the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips that were issued when voters used EVMs to cast their preference. The ECI has insisted that EVMs are secure due to administrative safeguards in their transport and implementation, as well as due to the pre-programming that is done on the machines at the factory level.
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