The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Friday, April, 5, 2024, vehemently opposed a writ petition filed by the DMK questioning the design of third-generation M3 Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in which the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) printers are sandwiched between the balloting units and control units without a direction connection between the two units.
Appearing before the first Division Bench of Chief Justice Sanjay V. Gangapurwala and Justice J. Sathya Narayana Prasad, ECI counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan said, such writ petitions filed by political parties time and again end up creating absolutely unnecessary apprehension in the minds of the voters. “It will send a wrong message. People will start doubting the EVMs,” he told the Bench.
He said EVMs were being used for elections in the country since the early 1980s and no one who had approached the courts so far had been able to prove the possibility of tampering with those machines. “Raising questions over the use of the machines during every other election amounts to flogging a dead horse. It does not serve any better purpose,” the counsel said.
