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The Supreme Court will pass directions on petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of vote count in electronic voting machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips today. The Bench headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna on April 18 had reserved the case for judgment.
The Bench heard a batch of petitions which sought directions to tally Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips with votes cast through electronic voting machines (EVMs) during the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.
Also read: SC says EVM microcontrollers are ‘agnostic’, do not recognise parties or candidates, only buttons
The petitioners, including the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), asserted that voters have the fundamental right to feel confident about the electoral process. They also argued that 97 crore registered voters in the country had a right to a more transparent electoral system, with or without EVMs.
The VVPAT machine is attached to the ballot unit of the EVM and prints out a slip of paper with the voter’s choice once the vote is cast. The slip is visible for seven seconds for the voter to verify if their vote was cast correctly before it falls into a compartment kept underneath. Polling officials use these slips to verify votes cast. Not all votes are verified, polling officers use the VVPAT slips to verify votes cast in five randomly selected polling booths.
Also read: What is the EVM-VVPAT verification issue before the Supreme Court? | Explained
The petitioners have demanded cross-verifying all the votes cast on the EVM with VVPAT paper slips to accord more credibility to the polling process. Highlighting that there exists a risk of manipulation, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan pointed out that both EVMS and VVPATs have a “programmable chip” and that the ECI has previously denied sharing their “source code” on the ground that they constitute the intellectual property of the manufacturers.
The ECI said it matched EVM votes with more than 4 crore VVPAT slips and noted that no discrepancies have been recorded till now. It asserted that it is impossible to manipulate EVMs.
Also read: EVMs can neither be hacked nor tampered with, ECI tells SC
The ECI said EVMs can neither be hacked nor tampered with and that the EVMs are “totally stand-alone machines having one-time programmable chips”. It also said that counting 100% VVPAT slips would pose a “great difficulty”, saying it would take an hour to count the slips from one VVPAT alone. It also said it received only 25 complaints, and all were found false. It also told the Court that the EVM manufacturers did not know which button would be allocated to which candidate, or the constituency to which the machine would be sent
