Tinkering of EVMs have been a huge grouch of the opposition after the BJP's sweeping victory in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the last round of assembly polls earlier this year. In the run-up to the elections in Gujarat, the Congress had made no bones about its concerns. The party had even suggested that cellphone jammers be kept outside guarded rooms where EVMs would be kept after polling.
"There are 24,000 polling booths in Gujarat, the problem has occurred in 7 or 8 booths," Chief Election Commissioner Achal Kumar Jyoti told NDTV. "We have a number of EVMs in reserve. Concerned officials keeping continuous check," he said.
Gujarat Election 2017: Kutch, Saurashtra and south Gujarat are voting in Phase 1 of Gujarat polls.
Earlier this year, Mayawati, whose party had got steamrolled in Uttar Pradesh, had alleged that the BJP victory had been made possible through mass-scale rigging. Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party, which had lost in Punjab, had echoed the allegations.
Denying the accusations, the Election Commission had issued a challenge asking anyone to hack the machines in what it called a "hackathon", but there were no takers for it.
The allegations of tampering surfaced again after the local body elections in Meerut and Kanpur last month, which too, were won by the BJP. The Election Commission said those were instances of malfunction, not tampering, and the machines had been replaced.
