Petitions Seeking 100% EVM-VVPAT Verification Listed Tomorrow In Supreme Court For Directions

The Supreme Court is expected to pass directions tomorrow(April 24) on petitions seeking 100% verification of the votes recorded in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.

As per the causelist, the petitions are listed tomorrow in the Supreme Court "For Directions." A bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta had reserved judgment on the petitions on April 18 after two days of hearing.

During the hearing, the bench extensively interacted with an official from the Election Commission of India (ECI) to understand the working of the EVMs and VVPATs and their security features. The ECI asserted that the EVMs cannot be tampered with under any circumstance and that the complete counting of the VVPAT slips was not practically feasible.

The writ petitions have been filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Abhay Bhakchand Chhajed and Arun Kumar Aggarwal.

The petitioners, stressing that the measures to increase the confidence of the voters must be adopted, argued that a few days' delay in the declaration of results is a small price to pay for the larger goal of a fair and transparent election process. During the hearing, the bench also orally expressed reservations about the manual counting process, saying that human interventions can lead to problems.

As per the current practice, the ECI randmoly verifies the VVPAT slips of EVMs from five polling booths per assembly segment in a Parliamentary constituency. This is in terms of a direction passed by the Supreme Court in 2019 which directed the ECI to increase the verification from one polling booth to five polling booths per assembly segment.