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Saturday | 20 April, 2024

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Impossible to tamper with EVMs at any stage: Election Commission in Supreme Court

The Election Commission of India (EC) has assured the Supreme Court that electronic voting machines (EVMs), used for casting votes during elections in India, cannot be tampered with at “any stage”.

The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its judgement on pleas that 97 crore registered voters in the country have a right to a more transparent electoral system, with or without EVMs. After two days of marathon hearing, a Bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta told petitioners, including Association for Democratic Reforms, that “it was not good to be over-suspicious about everything”.

Appearing for petitioners, Advocate Prashant Bhushan and senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan highlighted the fundamental right of the voter to confirm that his vote has been cast right. Some of the ideas discussed during the hearing included returning to paper ballots, bar codes for individual candidates, and having more translucent peepholes on Voter Verifiable Paper Audit trail (VVPATs).

Currently, cross-verification of EVM-VVPAT happens only in five randomly selected polling booths in a constituency. The court was hearing petitions seeking cross-verification of 100% EVM votes with VVPAT paper slips.

“On an average, 1,000 VVPAT slips are required to be counted per polling station… The small size and special nature of the paper makes the slips sticky. Manual counting of VVPAT slips is cumbersome at every step. The process cannot be expedited or hurried,” the EC said.

According to the polling authority, over four crore VVPAT paper slips were matched till date and not a single instance of mismatch has been noted, the EC added.

India first adopted EVM in an election in Kerala’s Paravur township in an Assembly election in 1982 when 50 out of 123 booths replaced traditional paper ballots with EVMs. Although there was resistance and the practice of electronic voting wasn’t immediately implemented throughout the country, eventually, the voting system replaced ballot papers fully in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections across all 543 parliamentary constituencies.