Enable Voters To Verify Votes Have Been ‘Recorded As Cast’ & ‘Counted As Recorded’ : Plea In Supreme Court

The NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, has filed a petition in the Supreme Court through Advocate Prashant Bhushan seeking a declaration that is the fundamental right of every voter to verify that their vote has been ‘recorded as cast’ and ‘counted as recorded’.

The petition seeks appropriate changes in the Voter Verified Paper Trail (VVPAT) mechanism to enforce this right.

The petition has sought to give "full effect" to the directions passed by Supreme Court in the judgement Subramanian Swamy v. Election Commission of India, (2013) where the Apex Court held that “‘paper trail’ is an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections. The petition argues that each voter must be able to verify that their vote has been ‘recorded as cast’ and that their vote has been ‘counted as recorded’. It adds that the requirement of the voter verifying that her vote has been ‘recorded as cast’ is somewhat met when the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing of the button on the EVM through a transparent window for the voter to verify that her vote has been ‘recorded as cast’ on the internally printed VVPAT slip before the slip falls into a ‘ballot box’. 

However, it adds, that there exists a "complete vacuum" in law as the ECI has provided no procedure for the voter to verify that her vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ which is an indispensable part of voter verifiability. The petition contends that the prevalent procedure through which the ECI only counts the electronically recorded votes in all of the EVMs and cross verifies the relevant EVMs with the VVPATs in only 5 randomly selected polling stations in each assembly constituency is deficient because of the following reasons–

1. The electronic recording of the voter’s choice in the EVM does not meet the criteria of vote being verified as ‘recorded as cast’ as the voter only verifies the VVPAT;

2. There is no way for any of the voters to verify that their individual vote has actually been ‘counted as recorded’ because there is no procedure provided for by the ECI for them to match the VVPATs that they had certified as being ‘recorded as cast’ with what is actually counted;

3. Rule 56(D)(4)(b) as incorporated through Section 66-A of Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, itself provides that the count of VVPATs shall prevail over the count reflected in EVMs which is a statutory admission/acknowledgement that it is finally the VVPAT which accurately captures the will of the voter and that variance/errors/malafides in the results captured in the EVMs cannot be ruled out.

It adds further–

"The count stored in EVMs are inherently open to variance with the count reflected in VVPATs due to any number of reasons such as bonafide human errors in the complex seriatium of do’s and dont’s prescribed by the ECI involving a number of individuals to discharge their responsibilities with 100% accuracy each time over a long period of time; technical snags; &/or malafide actions."

Accordingly, the petition seeks a declaration that it is the fundamental right of every voter