SC pans EVM critics and says no attempts should be made to bring down the system
The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed criticism of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and calls to return to ballot papers, saying the election process in India is a “herculean task” and no attempts should be made to “bring down the system to fetch”.
It was also a reminder of how, in the era of ballots, polling booths were captured to manipulate election results.
The top court was hearing a batch of pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), an independent vote verification system through which a voter can see whether his vote has been cast correctly.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta was critical of the argument that many European countries have returned to ballot papers after trying out voting machines.
“This is a gigantic task. No European country can do this. You talked about Germany, but what is the population there. My home state of West Bengal is much more densely populated than Germany. We must have confidence in the electoral process. Don’ Do not try to bring down the system like this,” Justice Datta told lawyer Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the NGO ‘Association for Democratic Reforms’.
Bhushan had advocated a return to ballot papers citing the German example.
The bench said there were about 98 crore registered voters in India. “There will be some discrepancy in vote counts due to human error, but this can be countered and controlled,” the report said.
Justice Khanna, while referring to past stand fixing, said, “Mr. Bhushan, we are all in our sixties. We have seen what happened in the past when there were no EVMs. We don’t need to tell you.”
Bhushan claims that he is not defaming the Election Commission or saying that EVMs are rigged. He said his only point is that these voting machines can be tampered with.
Normally, human intervention in a process causes problems including bias, while machines, without any wrong human intervention, work properly and produce accurate results, Justice Khanna told Bhushan.
The bench asked a barrage of questions to the Election Commission officials present in the court on the functioning of EVMs, its storage and possibility of data manipulation.
“We want you to apprise us of every detail from point A to Z of the EVMs, right from assembly to storage after counting of votes,” the bench told senior advocate Maninder Singh, who appeared for the election commission appeared.
Bhushan said he also wants every voter to be allowed to take the paper slip containing his cast vote from the VVPAT machine and deposit it in the ballot box. He also demanded reversal of the polling body’s decision to replace the transparent glass on VVPAT machines with an opaque glass that allows a voter to see the slip only when the light is on for seven seconds.
He alleged that two public sector companies – Bharat Electronic Ltd and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECILL) – have people linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party as directors.
The bench asked Singh whether it is possible to subject EVMs to technical evaluation to rule out foul play after counting of votes is over.
Singh urged the court not to report such a thing without hearing the poll panel on the issue as it would cause unnecessary confusion.
“Don’t worry. We are not indicating anything like that but just asking for a response,” Justice Khanna told Singh.
The bench also asked the poll panel to apprise it of the punishment prescribed by law for someone manipulating EVMs.
“If any manipulation is committed, what will be the consequence? What is the punishment prescribed by law? Tell us. This is a very serious matter because there must be some fear of the consequences,” the court said against Singh.
Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for activist Arun Kumar Agrawal, who has sought a complete count of the VVPAT failures in the polls, stated that there should not be even an iota of doubt about the election process and the Election Commission should to assure.
He alleged that a parliamentary committee had found discrepancies in the EVM data after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, but the Election Commission never responded to the panel.
“There is a very high chance of errors. We always blame the public for everything, including the number of cases clogging our justice system. We need to focus on the system so that there is not an iota of doubt in the minds of even one voter.” he said.
During the nearly two-hour hearing, several lawyers for different petitioners addressed the court, with some suggesting the use of barcodes to reduce the chances of tampering of EVMs. One of them alleged that there was conflict of interest among some of the members of the Election Commission’s technical committee, saying that they were the inventors and designers of the EVMs.
The hearing remained unclear and was scheduled to resume on April 18.
The seven-phase Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 19.
The ADR has sought to match the count in EVMs with votes that are demonstrably “recorded as cast” and to ensure that the voter can verify through the VVPAT form that his vote, as recorded on the paper slip, has been “counted as registered”. “.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: April 17, 2024 | 12:21 pm IST