Supreme Court Dismisses Plea Seeking Review Of EVM-VVPAT Verdict
Debby Jain
30 July 2024 4:00 PM GMT
The Supreme Court on July 25 dismissed a plea seeking review of the judgment in the EVM-VVPAT case, vide which prayer for 100% cross-verification of EVM data with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) records was denied.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta passed the order on finding no ground to interfere with the April 26 judgment. It stated:
"We have carefully perused the review petition, as also the grounds in support thereof. In our opinion, no case for review of the judgment dated 26.04.2024 is made out. The review petition is, accordingly, dismissed."
It may be recalled that a batch of petitions were filed by NGO-Association for Democratic Reforms, Abhay Bhakchand Chhajed and Arun Kumar Aggarwal, praying that instead of the prevalent procedure, where the Election Commission cross-verified EVM votes with VVPATs in only 5 randomly selected polling stations in each assembly constituency, all VVPATs be verified. They further sought measures to ensure that a vote is 'recorded as cast' and 'counted as recorded'.
The ECI opposed the pleas saying that it was another attempt to cast doubt over the functioning of EVMs and VVPATs on 'vague and baseless' grounds. In addition, it was argued that counting all VVPAT paper slips manually, as suggested, would not only be labor and time-intensive, but also be prone to 'human error' and 'mischief'. It was further the ECI's case that EVMs are non-tamperable and voters have no such fundamental right as claimed by the petitioners.
After a prolonged hearing, the Bench of Justices Khanna and Datta delivered two separate, concurring judgements in the matter, while issuing two directions relating to sealing of Symbol Loading Units and verification of 5% burnt memory microcontrollers per assembly constituency or assembly segment of the Parliamentary constituency.
Seeking review of the said judgment, petitioner-Arun Kumar Agarwal filed the present petition, claiming that there were errors apparent in it.
"It is not correct to state that the result will be unreasonably delayed, or the manpower required will be the double of that already deployed...existing CCTV surveillance of counting halls would ensure that manipulation and mischief does not occur in VVPAT slip counting," the review petition stated.
It was Agarwal's case that SLUs are vulnerable and need to be audited, but this was ignored by the court. "This Hon'ble Court completely overlooked the possibility that the data in the SLU can have extra bytes other than just the necessary images", he claimed in the review petition.
Reports on the April 26 judgment in the EVM-VVPAT case can be read here. To understand the underlying controversy, ie the EVM-VVPAT issue, click here.
Case Title: Arun Kumar Agrawal v. Election Commission of India, Review Petition (C) No. 1263/2024
