The Supreme Court, on Tuesday, heard pleas filed by three petitioners seeking cross-verification of votes on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slip in elections.
After hearing the matter for more than two hours, the apex court bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta posted the matter on April 18 (Thursday) for further hearing, just a day ahead of the first of seven phase Lok Sabha polls 2024.
Appearing for the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), advocate Prashant Bhushan told the top court that either the polling process should return to ballot paper or all VVPAT slips should be counted and tallied with the voters shown by EVMs.
‘Can go back to paper ballots’
“We can go back to paper ballots. Another option is to give VVPAT slip to the voters in hand. Otherwise the slips falls into the machine and the slip can be then given to the voter and it can be put into the ballot box. Then the VVPAT design was changed. It had to be a transparent glass but it was changed to dark opaque mirror glass where it is only visible when the light is on for 7 seconds,” Advocate Bhushan said.
The bench told Advocate Bhushan that it considered the matter in 2019 and had ordered to increase the count of VVPATs from one to five EVMs per assembly segment in a assembly constituency.
Responding to the Court, Bhushan said the order was in view of the paucity of the time ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and that the issue was still open for adjudication.
Advocate Bhushan went on say that EVMs and VVPATs have programmable chips and malicious programs can be inserted to them. “We aren’t saying they (EVMs) are manipulated or have been. We are saying they can be manipulated as both EVM and VVPAT,” he added.
Bhushan further said European countries like Germany are still using ballot papers. To this, the Court said they have a population of only about 5-6 crores, whereas in India there are avout 98 crore eligible voters.
He further said that counting of all VVPAT slips won’t take that much amount of time if it is done in parallel instead of sequentially.
“My home state West Bengal has more population than Germany. We need to repose some trust and faith on somebody. Do not try to bring down the system like this,” Justice Datta said.
‘Votes on EVM should be tallied with VVPAT slips’
Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde, who was appearing for another petitioner, said the votes on EVM should be tallied with VVPAT slips.
The bench, however, questioned the practicality of this suggestions.
“ECI says 12 days will be taken to count all the VVPAT Slips,” Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan said.
Bhushan said currently VVPAT slips are tallied only with respect to 5 EVMs in an assembly segment which was too less.
“They are only counting 5 VVPAT machines per assembly when there are 200 such machines this is 5 percent only and there can be no justification in this. The seven second light can also lead to manipulation. The voter should be allowed to take the VVPAT slip to put it into the ballot box,” Bhushan said.
During the hearing, Sankaranarayanan highlighted a BloombergQuint report as per which there were discrepancies between EVMs and VVPAT slips in 373 constituencies.
“What we are saying that the paper slip falls from the box and we collect that paper slip.. and we see what we have voted for. From the 2019 elections, the BloombergQuint analysed the data on the ECs website to go state-wise and this data was pulled from the website later and there were discrepancies in 373 constituencies,” Sankaranarayanan said.
‘Human intervention can cause problems’: SC
“Normally, human intervention is going to create problems,” Justice Khanna said, addressing the petitioners.
“Then questions regarding human weaknesses, including bias, will arise. Machine normally, without any wrong human intervention, will work properly, will give accurate results. Yes, problem arises when there is human intervention to make manipulations or unauthorised changes. That premise, if you want to argue on that, do,” Justice Khanna said.
He later said: “When you do hand counting, there will be different numbers counting”.
The bench also raised doubts about the feasibility of the physical counting of votes given the large population of India.
After hearing the petitioners, the bench posed questions to Senior Advocate Maninder Singh, for the Election Commission of India (ECI), to ascertain the measures taken to ensure the security of the EVMs.
An officer from the ECI was also present in the Court to explain the security features of the machines.
The bench was told that the machines are sealed in the presence of the representatives of the candidates and that they are kept in a tamper-proof condition.
The Court also asked the ECI about the punishment for tampering with EVMs.
With inputs from agencies
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Can go back to paper ballots or handover VVPAT slip to voters: What SC was told in hearing
