Ex-Minister Ridicules Elon Musk’s ‘EVM Hacking’ Comments

Elon Musk earlier commented that the Electronic voting machines should be eliminated. ‘The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high’, he said while reacting to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s comments on Puerto Rico’s primary elections experienced voting irregularities due to EVMs.

Responding to Musk’s claims, India’s former Electronics and IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called Musk’s factually incorrect in saying that.

‘A calculator or a toaster cannot be hacked. Therefore, there is a limit in terms of where this paradigm of hacking can extend,” he told news agency ANI. “He (Elon Musk) is factually wrong… To claim that there cannot be a secure digital product in the world is to then say that every Tesla car can be hacked,’ Chandrasekhar said.

Chandrasekhar further said Elon Musk does not understand what the Indian EVM is. Indian EVMs do not lend themselves to being hacked because they are precisely a very limited-intelligence device’.

‘This is a huge sweeping generalization statement that implies no one can build secure digital hardware. Wrong. No connectivity, no Bluetooth, wifi, or Internet; there is no way in. Factory-programmed controllers that cannot be reprogrammed. Electronic voting machines can be architected and built right as India has done. We would be happy to run a tutorial, Elon,’ Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in his post.

It has to be seen how Elon Musk would respond to these comments of the former Minister.