The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its judgment on petitions seeking cross-verification of votes cast on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with paper slips generated through the Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system, saying “we don’t have to be suspicious about everything”.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta reserved its verdict after hearing the response of Election Commission on the pleas. The petitioners have also sought 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.
During the hearing, senior advocate Maninder Singh, appearing for the Election Commission, explained the process of how an EVM functions and said there had to be sanctity in the electoral process.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan and senior advocate Gopal Sankararanarayanan appeared for the petitioners. On April 16, the top court had deprecated criticism of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and calls for reverting to ballot papers, saying the electoral process in India is a “humongous task” and attempts should not be made to “bring down the system”.
Here are the top quotes from the hearing
- The Election Commission of India told the court that no EVM tampering was possible.
- The Centre said such petitions came right ahead of elections so that an impression can be created that there’s something wrong with the system.
- Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said it’s to harm democracy. He added that the petitioners were making the choice of voters a joke.
- An ECI official told the court that the news report regarding Kasargod was utterly false as the algorithm was faulty in 2019. “Now we have updated it and it was working fine,” he added. To this, the court asked, “In 2019, what were the faults in the application? Wrong information was being fed?”
- The official replied, saying it was not getting updated in a synchronous manner. Justice Khanna asked, “What is the gap between the vote recorded in 17A and the vote cast in the machine?”
- The official answered, “There is no gap between 17C and votes recorded in the machine.” To this, Justice Khanna said, “I agree there will be no mismatch between 17A and 17C.”
- “We have been preparing for these elections for the past three years. We have taken a lot of painstaking efforts. We are quite pained by what has been said before this court,” the ECI told the court.
- The ECI said, “It has been stated that there has been only one discrepancy so far.”
- The court said, “The voter turnout these days is around 66%. This shows the faith of the people.”
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