Rajeev Chandrasekhar Counters Musk on EVMs - Tesla CEO Responds

New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Former Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Sunday strongly countered Elon Musk's criticism of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and termed it "a huge sweeping generalisation" even as the Tesla boss responded saying "anything can be hacked".

The back-and-forth of words on X (formerly Twitter) played out as Chandrasekhar disagreed with Musk's post where he had advocated eliminating electronic voting machines.

"We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high," Musk wrote on Saturday, sharing a post by Robert F Kennedy Jr that had cited media reports about hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines in Puerto Rico's primary elections.

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".

"This is a huge sweeping generalisation statement that implies no one can build secure digital hardware. Wrong," Chandrasekhar said.

He further said that while such a view "may apply to US and other places - where they use regular compute platforms to build Internet connected Voting machines", the Indian EVMs are secure and isolated from any network.

"But 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," Chandrasekhar added.

He asserted that electronic voting machines can be architected and built right as India has done, and quipped "We would be happy to run a tutorial Elon".

Replying to this, Musk said: "Anything can be hacked".