Supreme Court says no to 100% verification of Electronic Voting Machines votes with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail slips

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday rejected all the petitions seeking 100 percent verification of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) votes with their Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar also rejected their prayer to revert to a paper ballot voting system. “We have rejected all of them after referring to the protocol in place, technical aspects, and data that is on record,” said the bench in separate yet concurring judgements.

The apex court gave two directions, saying, “One direction is that after the completion of the symbol loading process, the symbol loading unit (SLU) should be sealed in containers. The SLU should be stored at least for a period of 45 days.”

The top court, in its second direction, said that the burnt memory in the microcontroller EVM shall be checked by a team of engineers after the declaration of results on a request by candidates, and such a request for verification shall be made within seven days after the declaration of results.

The expenses for the verification are to be borne by the candidates making the request, said the bench, adding that in case the EVM is found to be tampered with, the expenses will be refunded.

The bench also asked the ECI to examine the EVM for vote counting on the paper slips and whether, along with the symbol, there could be a bar code for each party.

Justice Datta, in his separate judgement, said that blindly distrusting a system can lead to unwarranted kepticism. “Instead, a critical yet constructive approach guided by evidence and reason should be followed... to ensure the system’s credibility and effectiveness,” Justice Datta said in his judgement. Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, during a March 16 press conference on the announcement of the general election, said that EVMs are 100 percent safe.

More than 40 times, constitutional courts have upheld the credibility of EVMs, Kumar said.

The verdict of the top court came on petitions that sought cross-verification by the voters of votes cast by them as “counted as recorded” in the EVMs with VVPAT.

Currently, VVPAT slips of five randomly selected EVMs in every assembly segment are verified. Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Arun Kumar Aggarwal, among others, filed petitions in the top court, saying that during the hearing, the apex court had said that everything cannot be suspected and they don’t have to be critical about each and every aspect of EVMs.

An ECI official was present in the courtroom during the hearing to explain the workings of the EVMs and VVPAT to the bench. He has apprised the court that there has been no mismatch ever between EVMs and VVPAT slips. The petitions sought more extensive verification of EVM data against VVPAT records.

The requirement of the voters verifying that their votes have been “recorded as cast” is somewhat met when the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing the button on the EVM through a transparent window for the voters to verify that their vote has been recorded on the internally printed VVPAT slip before the slip falls into the ‘ballot box’, the plea stated.

It said that, however, there is a complete vacuum in law as the poll panel has provided no procedure for the voter to verify that his or her vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ which is an indispensable part of voter verifiability. (ANI)

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