Supreme Court Issues Notice to Election Commission Regarding Plea for Cross-Verification of EVM and VVPAT Counts

Supreme Court Issues Notice to Election Commission Regarding Plea for Cross-Verification of EVM: As opposed to the current practice of verifying only five randomly selected EVMs through VVPAT paper slips, the Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Election Commission on a plea seeking a complete count of VVPAT slips in elections.

A bench of Justices B R Gavai and Sandeep Mehta sought a response from the poll panel and the Union government on a petition filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal.

Supreme Court issues notice to the Election Commission on plea of 21 Opposition parties seeking direction that 50 per cent EVM results are matched and crosschecked with VVPATs before the declaration of results in the upcoming General Elections. pic.twitter.com/YP1aTHJu46

— ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

“Given that many experts are raising questions with regard to VVPATs and EVMs and given that there have been many reports of discrepancies between EVM and VVPAT vote counts in the past, all VVPAT slips must be counted and the voter is given the opportunity to verify that the vote he cast on the ballot has also been counted by dropping the VVPAT slip on the ballot box,” said the plea.

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Further, the petition challenged the EC’s guidelines, which mandated that VVPAT verification take place sequentially, resulting in undue delays. According to the report, if simultaneous verification is conducted and more officers are deployed for counting in each assembly constituency, a complete VVPAT verification can be completed within five to six hours.

According to the plea, the government has spent nearly Rs 5,000 crore on the purchase of nearly 24 lakh VVPATs, but only 20,000 are verified at present.

“Democracy is a part of the basic structure of our Constitution and rule of law and free and fair election are basic features of democracy….The voter has right under Article 19 and 21 to cross verify his vote as cast by him and counted by paper vote of VVPAT in accordance with the purport and object of directions of this Court in Subramanian Swamy case (2013),” the plea said.

Also, the court was asked to make the VVPAT machine’s glass transparent and to extend the duration of the light so that the voter can see the paper recording his vote.

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