New Delhi, April 2: An unusually aggressive Election Commission today asked Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to "introspect" instead of blaming the electronic voting machines for his party's poor showing in the Punjab Assembly elections.

"It is for your party to introspect as to why your party could not perform as per your expectations and it is unfair on the part of your party to attribute unsatisfactory poll performance to the alleged tamperability of EVMs. The commission is fully satisfied with the functioning of the EVMs," the poll panel said.

It is rare for the commission to issue such homilies to a political party. It usually restricts itself to factually answering questions raised in petitions. Its latest reply, however, hands out a rebuke to the Aam Aadmi Party while accusing it of misreading the Supreme Court's observations on the voting machines.

"The Supreme Court had never cast any aspersion or expressed any doubt that election process is rigged by the use of EVMs. The commission strongly objects to this wrong and imaginary extrapolation of Supreme Court's order. This may please be noted as a responsible political party."

Kejriwal's party had approached the poll panel on March 23 on the possible tampering of voting machines during the recent Assembly elections, as had Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati earlier last month.

Yesterday, Aam Aadmi Party and Congress teams had met the commission to seek mandatory paper trails for the machines, or their replacement with paper ballots, after a voting machine allegedly malfunctioned during a demo in Madhya Pradesh on Friday. Commission officials, however, have denied any such glitch.

In its reply to Kejriwal, the commission said it had installed an elaborate technical and administrative system of safeguards to ensure error-free functioning by the voting machines during elections.

It referred to its March 16 letter to Mayawati that dealt exhaustively with technical details of the machines. It said that India's voting machines were "fundamentally different" from those used in other countries, which are "vulnerable to hacking" because they are computer-based and connected to the Internet.

Further, it said, the software in the chip used in Indian voting machines "is one-time programmable and burnt into the chip at the time of manufacture", which means "nothing can be written on the chip after manufacture".

It recalled that, in 2009, all who had complained about the rigging of voting machines had been invited to prove their charges but none could demonstrate how the machines could be tampered with.

It noted that the introduction of the voter-verified paper audit trail had increased the transparency and verifiability of the polling process.

Although the use of paper trail devices hasn't been made mandatory, the commission said it was "fully committed" to deploying them "in a phased manner" given the constraints of government finances and the manufacturers' production capacity.

Referring to the complaints lodged by the Congress and the Aam Admi Party yesterday, the commission reiterated its decision to send a "high-level" team, led by Andhra Pradesh chief electoral officer Bhanwar Lal, to supervise the April 9 by-elections in Madhya Pradesh.

It also cited its decision to send teams of commission officials and technical experts to demonstrate the "integrity" of the voting machines and paper trail devices "to the complete satisfaction of all stakeholders".

Both decisions had been announced in a commission statement last evening.

The BJP too entered the arena, reaffirming its faith in the commission and rejecting the charges of rigging.

"We lost in a state like Punjab which was ruled by the BJP-Akali Dal alliance, while the (ruling) Samajwadi Party lost in Uttar Pradesh," BJP general secretary Bhupendra Yadav said.

In both states, he stressed, the voting machines were with the district magistrates, who functioned under the government of the day.

Last month, the Supreme Court had sought the commission's response to a public interest plea that alleges the rigging of voting machines during the recent Assembly elections in five states and civic polls in Maharashtra.