Supreme Court order on pleas seeking complete verification of VVPAT slips today

Supreme Court order on pleas seeking complete verification of VVPAT slips today

The Supreme Court will on Wednesday pronounce its order on pleas seeking the complete verification of votes recorded in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.

A two-judge bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta will pronounce the order today.

Presently, VVPAT verification is done only in five randomly selected EVMs in each Assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court had issued a notice to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on a petition seeking the counting of all VVPAT paper slips in elections, instead of verifying only the five randomly selected EVMs.

It also asked the poll bodyÂ

The petition challenged the Election Commission’s guidelines that mandate that VVPAT verification shall be done sequentially, that is one after the other, thereby causing undue delay.

It contended that if simultaneous verification was done and an additional number of officers were deployed for counting in each Assembly constituency, then complete VVPAT verification could be done in just five to six hours.

On its part, the poll body has asserted that EVMs cannot be tampered with under any circumstances and that the complete counting of the VVPAT slips was not practically feasible.

During a hearing on April 18, the Commission told the Supreme Court that it was pained by what was said about VVPAT slips in EVMs and underlined that it took “painstaking efforts” to prepare for the elections for the past three years.

It also underlined that all EVMs undergo mock drills before being deployed for elections and that candidates are allowed to randomly pick up 5 per cent of the machines.

The ECI said that the process is repeated on the voting day.

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