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New Delhi, April 26 (The Hindu): The Indian Supreme Court on Friday rejected a batch of petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of vote count in electronic voting machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips.
It has also declined a plea to bring back paper ballots for the voting process.
The main opinion of Justice Sanjiv Khanna was concurred with by Justice Dipankar Datta in a separate opinion. The pronouncement of the verdict coincides with the second phase of polling for the General Elections to the Lok Sabha.
However, the Bench has issued a series of directions to strengthen the existing system. It has ordered sealing of the Symbol Loading Units (SLUs) after the symbol loading process on or after May 1, 2024. The sealed SLUs will be kept in the strong room along with the EVMs for 45 days after polling.
A recommendation to include an electronic machine for counting paper slips and bar codes along with symbols for political parties has also been made. However, it rejected pleas advanced by the petitioners to give voters access to VVPAT paper slips to put physically into the ballot boxes.
Notably, candidates can get 5% of the EVMs — ballot units, control units and VVPATs — of any given constituency verified by the engineers of the manufacturers following a written request to this effect. The request should be made within seven days of the declaration of the election results.
During the proceedings, the petitioners, including the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), pointed out that both EVMS and VVPATs have a “programmable chip” and that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has previously denied sharing their “source code” on the ground that they constitute the intellectual property of the manufacturers.
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. However, not all votes are verified – the VVPAT slips are used to verify votes cast only in five randomly selected polling booths per constituency.
Defending the existing system, the ECI said that it matched EVM votes with more than 4 crore VVPAT slips and asserted that no discrepancies have been recorded till now. It further assured that it is impossible to manipulate EVMs.
It also submitted that counting 100% VVPAT slips would pose a “great difficulty” as it would take an hour to count the slips from one VVPAT alone. The Court was also apprised 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.
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