We know flaws of ballot papers, SC tells EVM critics

NEW DELHI: “We are in our 60s. We all know what happened when there were ballot papers, you may have forgotten but we have not. As far as ballot box or ballot paper is concerned, we all know its drawbacks,” a Supreme Court bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta said Tuesday as it responded to pleas for discarding electronic voting machines (EVMs).

The petitioners have demanded 100% verification of EVM votes with VVPAT (voter-verifiable paper audit trail) slips just days before the first phase of Lok Sabha polls.

As advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for one of the petitioners, Association for Democratic Reforms, contended that many European countries had returned to paper ballots, Justices Khanna and Datta said a comparison could not be done with nations with tiny populations.

The court said holding elections in a country like India with such a large population was a humongous task and it was not like in European countries where the electorate consisted of only a few crore people. “We have to repose faith in the system. Let’s not bring it down,” the bench said.

Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for another petitioner, said it was the voters’ right to know that their votes had been cast for the party they voted for and for which one had to look at the VVPAT slip. He said voters needed physical interface and verification. “Allow me to pick up the slip and put it in the box,” he added.

The bench said normally, human interventions led to problems and human weakness could be there. It said machines, involving no human intervention, would give proper and accurate results.

The court asked about the hardware and software of EVMs to get an idea whether it could be tampered with. It directed the Election Commission to place before it steps related to handling of EVMs from the start of polling to counting.

The court also asked the petitioners to back their arguments with data to show the possibility of machines being tampered. The arguments remained inconclusive and will resume Thursday.

The EC had earlier opposed the plea for cross-verifying the count in EVMs with VVPATs in all polling booths instead of five randomly selected polling stations in every assembly constituency as of now. In an affidavit, the commission had said it would be a regressive step and amount to going back to the ballot paper system which would be “prone to human error and mischief”.

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