"We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high," tweeted out Elon Musk, stirring the hornet's nest ahead of the US Presidential elections.
His social media post has also become politically relevant in the Indian context, where the Opposition has been wanting its end whenever it loses an election.
How do Indian EVMs differ from those in many other countries?
As per former Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, EVMs in other countries use regular compute platforms to build Internet connected voting machines. On the other hand, Indian EVMs are custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media. "No connectivity, no bluetooth, wifi, Internet. ie there is no way in. Factory programmed controllers that cannot be reprogrammed," he wrote.