After facing a humiliating defeat in the last assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, the YSR Congress party leaders expressed serious doubts over the manipulation of electronic voting machines (EVMs).
Even party president and former chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy raised the issue on the day of results itself, but said he had no evidence to prove his suspicions over the manipulation of EVMs.
But after the recent election results in Haryana, where the Congress was the hot favourite to win the elections, many leaders have begun expressing doubts over the EVMs.
Jagan himself openly expressed his view that the results were totally manipulated in favour of the BJP through manipulation of EVMs.
Now, this has given a lot of confidence to psephologist Mastan of Aaraa group, who was the only one who had earlier predicted the victory of the YSRCP in the Andhra assembly elections.
He now says the Haryana results clearly established that the EVMs could easily be manipulated either through tampering or other ways.
In an interview to a television channel, Aaraa Mastan recalled that Naidu had also expressed doubts over the tampering of EVMs in 2019 when the TDP lost power.
“Now, he is not uttering a word about the EVMs,” he said.
He said the TDP leaders were very much aware of how the EVMs could be tampered.
“In the past, TDP expert Vemuri Hariprasad, along with present Union minister K Rammohan Naidu had even given a demonstration before the Election Commission on how to tamper the EVMs and manipulate the results,” he said, adding that even he had learnt from the TDP leaders how it could be done.
Explaining further, Aaraa Mastan said EVM tampering was done not in all the constituencies.
“The tampering is not done in the seats which the party can definitely win, but in those seats where there is a possibility of the party losing by thin margin,” he said.
He said if there are 200 polling stations in a constituency, the party that wants to win the seat will indulge in EVM tampering in the polling booths where it would get less than 50 percent.
“They will take into consideration the polling percentage in the previous elections and the present polling percentage. Only those seats where the fight is tough, they will do tampering,” Mastan said.
