The Supreme Court will pronounce on Wednesday certain directions on petitions seeking 100 per cent cross-verification of votes recorded in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips. The VVPAT is an independent vote verification system which enables electors to see whether their votes have been cast correctly.
The petitions have been listed "For Directions" by a bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta. The bench had reserved judgment on the petitions on April 18 after two days of hearing.
As per the current practice, the ECI randomly verifies the VVPAT slips of EVMs from five polling booths per assembly segment in a Parliamentary constituency. This is in terms of a direction passed by the Supreme Court in 2019 which directed the ECI to increase the verification from one polling booth to five polling booths per assembly segment.
During the hearing, the court had asked the Election Commission to explain the functioning of the VVPAT system. The bench had interacted for nearly an hour with senior Deputy Election Commissioner Nitesh Kumar Vyas to understand the functioning of EVMs and told advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the NGO that voter satisfaction and trust are at the core of the electoral process.
The petitioners argued for measures to increase the confidence of the voters, contending that a few days' delay in the declaration of results is a small price to pay for the larger goal of a fair and transparent election process. During the hearing, the bench also orally expressed reservations about the manual counting process, saying that human interventions can lead to problems.
The court also told petitioners, who sought its direction to go back to using ballot papers not to suspect the efficacy of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) and appreciate if the Election Commission does good work.
One of the petitioners, NGO 'Association for Democratic Reforms' (ADR), sought a reversal of the poll panel's 2017 decision to replace the transparent glass on VVPAT machines with an opaque glass through which a voter can see the slip only when the light is on for seven seconds.
Senior advocate Maninder Singh, appearing for the Election Commission, had submitted that EVMs are standalone machines and cannot be tampered with but possibility of human error cannot be ruled out.
The ADR has sought matching the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably "recorded as cast" and to ensure the voter is able to verify through VVPAT slip that his vote, as recorded on the paper slip, has been "counted as recorded".
(With PTI inputs)
