Supreme Court: After hearing the matter at length, the Division Bench comprising of Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Dutta, JJ., in separate but concurring judgments, rejected the petitions seeking directions for 100% cross-verification of all Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips with votes cast through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during elections.
The judgment was reserved for 18-04-2024, however, the matter was again taken up on 24-04-2024, as the Bench posed some queries for the Election Commission of India.
The Bench also rejected the pleas for paper ballot voting and complete EVM-VVPAT verification.
The Court gave the following directions:
After the symbol loading process is finished, the unit for symbol loading should be sealed and stored at least for 45 days, in the strong rooms along with the EVMs.
A team of engineers should check the burnt memory in the microcontroller EVM, after the declaration of the results, on a request made by the candidates who scored the second and the third position behind the highest polled candidate. The Court clarified that the verification expenses shall be borne by the candidate making such request. However, the expenses will be refunded if the EVMs are tampered with.
Background
In 1961, the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 was passed, and in 2013 VVPAT’s were introduced by an amendment. In Subramanian Swamy v. Election Commission of India, the Court directed the ECI to introduce VVPAT in EVMs for the very first time. Thereafter, ECI issued circular which mandated that VVPAT shall be universally used at all polling stations in all future elections to Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies conducted using EVMs. ECI also issued a Manual on Conduct of Elections with EVM-VVPAT along with a series of Circulars and Instructions. The present set of petitions challenged the procedure, where the Election Commission cross-verifies EVM votes with VVPATs at five randomly selected polling stations in each constituent assembly. The ECI argued that counting all VVPAT paper slips manually would be prone to ‘human error’ and require labour.
[Association of Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 434 of 2023]
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