The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Election Commission (EC) on a writ petition seeking a direction to mandatorily cross-verify the count in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with votes verifiably recorded as cast by counting all Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.
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A Bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and Sandeep Mehta tagged the petition filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal, represented by advocate Neha Rathi, with pending ones on the same issue.
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Ms. Rathi argued for a complete count of VVPAT slips in elections as opposed to the current practice of verification of only five randomly selected EVMs through VVPAT paper slips.
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The petition further challenged the EC’s guideline that mandated sequential VVPAT verification, that is, one after the other, causing undue delay.
The petition proposed simultaneous VVPAT verification by deploying more personnel for counting in each constituency. “This would allow VVPAT verification to be done in five to six hours,” the plea claimed.
It noted that while the government had spent nearly ₹5,000 crore to purchase nearly 24 lakh VVPATs, only slips from approximately 20,000 VVPATs could be verified.
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The petitioner said many questions have been raised by experts with regard to VVPATs and EVMs and the fact that large number of discrepancies between EVM and VVPAT vote count were reported in the past.
“So it is imperative that voters should be allowed to physically drop VVPAT slip as generated by the VVPAT in a ballot box to ensure that a voter’s ballot has been ‘counted as recorded’,” the petition mooted.
Alternatively, the petitioner sought a direction to the EC to make the glass of the VVPAT machine transparent and the duration of the light long enough for voters to see the paper recording their votes cut and drop into the drop box.