We're Ethical Hackers, Says Saurabh Bharadwaj Who Led AAP's Show-And-Tell

New Delhi: Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party or AAP is unfazed by the criticism that its attempt to prove that voting machines can be rigged had a fundamental flaw - it didn't use an actual voting machine, but a simulacrum.

"Unless they give us their EVMs we have to use a prototype only, what option do we have?" said Saurabh Bharadwaj, the 36-year-old former engineer, referring to the Election Commission which controls access to electronic voting machines or EVMs. 

Yesterday, Mr Bharadwaj, a legislator, conducted a televised and flashy hack of a voting machine assembled by IIT grads. His party said the half-hour demo proved that EVMs are not hard to rig, a claim denounced by the Election Commission, which said the machine employed was a namoona, an imitation that would fail even the most basic check used to test the robustness of EVMs employed for polling.

Mr Bharadwaj has been selected to represent his party at a hackathon that the Commission intends to conduct at the end of the month, where, it says, techies and others will fail at tampering with a machine that it will make available under strict supervision. "We are ethical hackers, we are trying to help them and show that these machines can be hacked and it's not rocket science," he told NDTV.

When Mr Kejriwal  strode through the national capital with a victory of historic proportions in 2015, he did not find fault with the machines used by voters. That complaint emerged after his high-energy and innovative campaign did not win Punjab, defying the forecasts of some exit polls and his own prediction. AAP, still a political novice that's five years old, accomplished the considerable feat of emerging as the main opposition party in an important state and expanding its footprint beyond Delhi. But it then lost crucial local elections in its home base last month, which has not subdued its campaign against voting machines.