The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard the pleas seeking counting and cross-verification of 100% VVPAT paper slips with Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The petitioners moved the top court against the present system of counting VVPATs in 5 randomly selected polling booths per Assembly. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has termed the demand by the petitioners as "regressive" and equivalent to reverting to paper ballot system. The court today heard the petitioners and adjourned the hearing till Thursday.
The petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) in 2023, stated that the current practice by the ECI to count the electronically recorded votes in all of the EVMs and cross-verify EVMs with the VVPATs in only 5 randomly selected polling booth per assembly constituency is not sufficient.
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Advocate Prashant Bhushan began his argument and told the court that the EVMs can be manipulated. Bhushan said, "we aren’t saying they are manipulated or have been. We are saying that they can be manipulated as both EVM and VVPAT have two kinds of chips. First memory in the chip that can be programmed and a flash memory used during symbol loading."
Bhushan further said that most European countries have done away with EVM as they found them unreliable. He contended that EVMs are programmable and so a malicious program can be installed.
A Bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta heard the case and posed several questions to the petitioners.
SC Rejects Proposal For Going Back To Ballot Paper System
The petitioners gave a bunch of suggestions to the bench on how the possibility of manipulation in EVMs can be dealt with. One of those suggestions was to bring back the ballot system as many European countries have done so after finding EVMs unreliable. The top court however rejected the proposal and said that everyone has seen what are the drawbacks of the Ballot Paper system.
"We are in our sixties...we have seen what used to happen during the ballot paper system" Justice Khanna remarked.
Justice Khanna while hearing the petitioners said that "Normally, human interventions lead to problems and human weakness can be there which includes biases as well. Machines normally without human intervention will give you accurate results. Yes, the problem arises when there is human intervention or makes unauthorised changes when they are around the software or machine. If you have any suggestion to avert this, then you can give us that."
Supreme Court Asks ECI What Is The Punishment For Manipulating EVMs
The bench also asked the ECI whether there is any law providing for punishment of officials for manipulating EVMs.
"Suppose there is some manipulation... then what punishment is prescribed...There should be a fear that if something wrong is done then there will be punishment," the bench said.
The ECI told the court that "Breach of office punishment is there." The court however, replied that it is not asking about the procedure.
"There is no specific provision with regard to manipulation done, if at all," Justice Khanna said.
However, the court reiterated that the system should not be doubted.
Justice Dipankar Datta said "We need to repose some trust and faith in somebody. Do not try to bring down the system like this."
What Petitioners Ask From SC In VVPAT-EVM Row
Just three days ahead of Lok Sabha elections, the apex court heard the writ petition moved under Article 32 for enforcing the fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India. Prashant Bhushan through the ADR plea contends that every voter has a fundamental right to verify that their vote has been 'recorded as cast' and 'counted as recorded'. He further points towards a 'complete vacuum' in law as ECI has not laid down any procedure for a voter to verify their vote.
The petitioners seek the following directions to the ECI:
1) To mandatorily cross verify the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably ‘recorded as cast’ by the voter through the VVPATs by counting all VVPAT slips.
2) Quashing and setting aside of Guideline No. 14.7(h) of the Manual on Electronic Voting Machine and VVPAT dated August, 2023 as framed and issued by ECI in so far as it allows only sequential verification of VVPAT slips resulting in undue delay in counting of all VVPAT slips. They have sought a parallel counting.
3) A direction that the voter should be allowed to physically drop VVPAT slip as generated by the VVPAT in a ballot box to ensure that the voter’s ballot has been ‘counted as recorded’.
4) A direction to the ECI to make the glass of the VVPAT machine transparent and duration of the light long enough for the voter to see the paper recording his vote cut and drop into the drop box so as to ensure greater satisfaction, which was the purport of earlier judgments by Supreme Court in 2013 in 'Dr. Subramanian Swamy vs Election Commission of India' and another in 2019 in N. Chandrababu Naidu case.