The Supreme Court will pass orders today on petitions seeking complete verification of the votes recorded in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.
A bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta will pronounce the order at 10. 30 AM. The bench had reserved the judgment on April 18.
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 in a small price to pay for the larger goal of 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.
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