SC asks EC to reply in 3 weeks on plea for cross verification of EVMs with VVPAT by voters

New Delhi [India], July 17 (ANI): The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Election Commission of India to respond to a plea seeking cross-verification by the voters of votes cast by them as “counted as recorded” in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Bela M Trivedi without issuing notice to the Election Commission asked the poll panel to file its response within three weeks.
It said that the copy of the petition filed by the NGO ‘Association for Democratic Reforms’ (ADR) is to be served upon the standing counsel of the poll panel.

The apex court told advocate Prashant Bhushan appearing for the NGO, “We think that it appears to be a case of over suspicion. We sometimes tend to be overly suspicious of certain matters. We are sure that the Election Commission might have taken steps to rectify any such problems if they existed. Therefore, we are not issuing notice and only asking for the copy to be served.”

Bhushan said in a similar petition the top court had issued notice in 2019, and urged the bench to tag this plea along with that. The bench clubbed the NGO’s plea with other pending petitions.

The NGO has sought direction to the Election Commission and the Centre to ensure the voters are able to verify through VVPATs that their vote has been “counted as recorded”.

Declare unconstitutional the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 and the practice and procedure of the Election Commission of India (ECI) to the extent that they violate the fundamental right of the voters to verify through VVPATs that their vote has been “recorded as cast” and “counted as recorded”, the plea said.

The requirement of the voters verifying that their votes have been “recorded as cast” is somewhat met when the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing the button on the EVM through a transparent window for the voters to verify that their vote has been recorded on the internally printed VVPAT slip before the slip falls into the ‘ballot box’, it stated.

It said that however, there is a complete vacuum in law as the poll panel has provided no procedure for the voter to verify that his/ her vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ which is an indispensable part of voter verifiability.