Supreme Court rejects all pleas for 100% EVM-VVPAT verification

Guwahati: In a major blow to all the petitioners, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and said “blindly distrusting” any aspect of the system can breed unwarranted scepticism.

Maintaining that “democracy is all about striving to build harmony and trust between all institutions”, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta delivered two concurring verdicts and dismissed all the pleas in the matter, including those seeking to go back to ballot papers in elections.

The Apex court issued two directives.

Pronouncing his verdict, Justice Khanna directed the Election Commission of India (ECI) to seal and store units used to load symbols for 45 days after the symbols have been loaded into electronic voting machines in strong rooms.

The top court also allowed engineers of the EVM manufacturers to verify the microcontroller of the machines after the declaration of the results at the request of candidates who stood second and third.

Request for the verification of the microcontroller can be made within seven days of declaration of the results after payment of fees, the court said.

“If EVM is found tampered during verification, fees paid by the candidates will be refunded,” it said.

An EVM comprises three units —the ballot unit, the control unit and the VVPAT.

All three are embedded with microcontrollers which have a burnt memory from the manufacturer.

Currently, the Election Commission conducts random matching of VVPAT slips with EVMs at five polling booths per assembly constituency.

“While maintaining a balanced perspective is crucial in evaluating systems or institutions, blindly distrusting any aspect of the system can breed unwarranted scepticism...,” Justice Datta said.

Defending the existing system, the ECI said that it matched EVM votes with more than 4 crore VVPAT slips and asserted that no discrepancies have been recorded till now. It further assured that it is impossible to manipulate EVMs.