The Supreme Court on April 3 has agreed to list a series of petitions seeking direction to the Election Commission of India to mandatorily cross-verify the count in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with votes verifiably recorded as cast by counting all Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who heads the Bench, assured senior advocates Kapil Sibal, Prashant Bhushan, Gopal Sankaranarayanan and advocate Neha Rathi, all appearing for various petitioners, including the NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, that the case would be listed the week after next.
A total of 102 Parliamentary constituencies in 21 States and Union Territories (UTs) would go to the polls in the first phase on April 19.
In an oral mentioning, the lawyers urged the court to hear the case before the elections, possibly even next week. “We may not be able to hear next week. That is why we said the week after next,” Justice Khanna responded.
Justice Khanna said the coming week has only Tuesday for detailed hearings, while Monday and Wednesday have been reserved for miscellaneous cases. Thursday and Friday (April 11 and April 12) are marked as gazetted and local holidays in the apex court calendar.
The petitions have sought a complete count of VVPAT slips in elections as opposed to the current practice of verification of only five randomly selected EVMs through VVPAT paper slips.
They referred to a reported judgment of the apex court in 2013 in Subramanian Swamy v. Election Commission of India that the election process should “have fullest transparency in the system and to restore the confidence of the voters”. The court had held that the “paper trail” was an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections” and directed the ECI to introduce VVPAT in EVMs.
“It is the satisfaction and verification of the voter that is at the heart of electoral democracy and not just that of the ECI, domain experts, political parties, or candidates,” the petitioners argued.
One of the petitions filed by activist Arun Kumar Agrawal has challenged a guideline of the Election Commission (EC) mandating sequential VVPAT verification, that is, one after the other, causing undue delay. The petitions propose simultaneous VVPAT verification by deploying more personnel for counting in each constituency. “This would allow VVPAT verification to be done in five to six hours,” the plea claimed.
It noted that while the government had spent nearly ₹5,000 crore to purchase nearly 24 lakh VVPATs, only slips from approximately 20,000 VVPATs could be verified.
The EC, in an affidavit in September last year, had countered that “there is no fundamental right of the voter to verify through VVPATs that their votes were ‘recorded as cast’ and ‘counted as recorded’”.
In the affidavit spanning over 450 pages, the EC assured the Supreme Court that EVMs could neither be hacked or tampered. They were “totally stand-alone machines having one-time programmable chips”. The poll body also ruled out the need to “re-design Voter-verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT)“.
“The existing VVPAT enables electors to check whether their votes have gone to the candidate of their choice… Further there is a provision for mandatory verification of printed VVPAT part slips of five randomly selected polling stations of each Assembly constituency/segment, which is the audit of the electronic vote before the results,” the EC said.
The EC said counting of 100% VVPAT slips would pose a “great difficulty”. For one, the chemically-coated slips were a “little sticky”. It would take an hour to count the slips from one VVPAT alone.
