Supreme Court to hear today pleas seeking 100% verification of EVM votes with VVPAT slips

Guwahati: The Supreme Court will hear a batch of pleas seeking cross-verification of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) votes cast with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), on Tuesday.

A bench comprising of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta will preside over the proceedings, considering petitions filed by NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) India & MyNeta and other concerned parties.

The petitions underscore the imperative of ensuring the accuracy and credibility of electoral outcomes by implementing comprehensive verification mechanisms.

The VVPAT is an independent vote verification system which enables an elector to see whether his vote was cast correctly.

The VVPAT generates a paper slip which can be viewed by the voter.

It is kept in a sealed cover and can be opened in case of a dispute.

On April 1, the Apex Court sought responses from the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Centre on a plea by activist Arun Kumar Agrawal seeking a complete count of VVPAT slips in polls as opposed to the current practice of tallying slips from only five randomly selected EVMs from each assembly segment comprising a parliamentary constituency.

The ADR has sought the Supreme Court’s direction to the poll panel and the Centre to ensure the voters can verify through VVPATs that their vote has been “counted as recorded.”

The petition that was filed seeks to match the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably “recorded as cast” and to ensure that the voter can verify through the VVPAT slip that his vote, as recorded on the paper slip, has been “counted as recorded.”

“However, there is a complete vacuum in law as the ECI has provided no procedure for the voter to verify that her vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ which is an indispensable part of voter verifiability. The failure of the ECI to provide for the same is in the teeth of purport and object of the directions issued by this Court in…Subramanian Swamy versus Election Commission of India (2013 verdict),” the plea said.