The Election Commission will meet representatives of 55 political parties on Friday morning to discuss the vulnerability, or lack of it, of Electronic Voting Machines. The meeting will be preceded by EC officials demonstrating the machines’ security features, and a decision will be made on the proposed hackathon, in which computer experts will try to tamper with the devices, NDTV reported.

A day before the meeting, the Aam Aadmi Party had upped its campaign against the use of EVMs in polls and demanded that an all-party committee be formed under the EC’s supervision and be given access to the voting machines used in recent elections, according to PTI.

Friday’s meeting comes in the wake of a demonstration by software engineer-turned-AAP legislator, Saurabh Bharadwaj, during which he had sought to suggest that all it takes to tamper with an EVM is a change in its motherboard. On Tuesday, Bharadwaj had demonstrated his point on a “lookalike” gadget in the Delhi Assembly. “All it takes is 90 seconds,” the AAP leader had claimed.

The Election Commission, however, rejected Bharadwaj’s charge and said anyone could tweak a “lookalike” gadget. In a statement, the polling monitor said any voting machine besides their own can be made to seem as though they have been hacked. The EC added that a “demonstration” like Bharadwaj’s cannot be “exploited” to influence it. “It is common sense that gadgets other than ECI-EVMs can be programmed to perform in a pre-determined way,” the statement said.

The controversy over EVM manipulation began after the results of the Assembly elections in five states were declared on March 11. While the EC has maintained that the voting machines are tamper-proof, Opposition parties have made repeated calls for the polling monitor to switch back to using the paper ballot system. On April 11, as many as 16 Opposition parties had written to the commission alleging that the tampering of EVMs had created a “deep-seated trust deficit” on their reliability.