Parties blame each other for sporadic violence in N Bengal
The Election Commission received over 100 complaints of violence and intimidation from three Lok Sabha segments, Cooch Behar, Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri.
The Election Commission's much-talked-about EVM challenge began at the EC office on Saturday with Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Left participating in it.
The poll panel has provided 14 randomly selected EVMs, which were used during the general and state elections in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, to prove that EVMs cannot be tampered with.
The poll panel is holding the hackathon challenge after several Opposition parties, including Aam Aadmi Party, raised doubts about reliability of the electronic voting machines (EVM).
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The allegations surfaced after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh Assembly election while the AAP suffered a loss in Punjab polls.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will organise its own EVM challenge at its party office. The AAP chose to organise its own hackathon after EC snubbed its request to hold an 'Open Hackathon' and refused to allow to change the motherboard of the machine.
According to reports, the Uttarakhand High Court had on Friday said holding the EVM challenge is unconstitutional and rejected a plea which called for a stay on it. The court barred all political parties, individuals, media and even social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter, from criticising the use of EVMs in the recently conducted assembly polls.
(With inputs from agencies)
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