New Delhi: A two-judge Supreme Court bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta on Tuesday (April 16) heard arguments by petitioners seeking a complete count of the paper trail generated by electronic voting machines (EVMs) after elections.
The bench did not pass any orders and further arguments will be heard on Thursday (April 18), one day before the general election is set to begin.
Voter-verifiable paper audit trail or VVPAT machines are part of EVMs and generate a paper trail of all votes cast.
The petitioners in the case have argued that a complete counting of the paper trail will help voters verify that their votes were counted as recorded by the VVPAT.
While Prashant Bhushan, an advocate representing one of the petitioners, said that counting the paper trail simultaneously instead of sequentially would save time, Justice Khanna said that human intervention would “create problems”.
“Normally, human intervention is going to create problems. Then questions regarding human weaknesses, including bias, will arise,” Justice Khanna said, adding that machines normally give accurate results, LiveLaw reported.
Its report also cited Bhushan as saying that EVMs were vulnerable to manipulation and as suggesting ballot voting as one possibly remedy. He also reportedly mentioned the example of Germany, which he said switched from using EVMs to using ballots.
Justice Datta responded by saying that Germany’s population couldn’t be compared to India’s.
“What is the population of Germany? Our country can’t be compared with any European country. The population of even my state, West Bengal, is greater than any of the European countries,” he was quoted as saying by the Deccan Herald.
The judge continued: “We need to repose some trust and faith. Do not try to bring down the system like this.”
“Mr Bhushan, we are all in our 60s. We have seen what used to happen earlier when there were no EVMs. We don’t need to tell you,” Justice Datta said at another point in the hearing as per the Press Trust of India.
When Bhushan said that a recent poll suggested that a majority of voters did not trust EVMs, Justice Datta asked him to refrain from trusting private polls in this case.
“This type of argument may not be acceptable because there is no data about that. A private poll will not be able to. It’s possible somebody else will take out a poll to the contrary,” the Indian Express quoted him as saying.
A pre-election poll by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’s Lokniti program found that close to half its respondents believed that EVMs were at least somewhat vulnerable to being manipulated by the ruling party.
The bench also asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) to appraise it of the details of EVMs, their functioning and the possibility they can be manipulated, PTI reported.
The ECI has previously argued that counting the paper trail from all VVPAT machines would pose a “great difficulty” and that voters did not have a fundamental right to verify that their votes had been ‘recorded as cast’ and ‘counted as recorded’.
VVPAT machines let voters see a paper slip that is printed within the machine for a period of seven seconds, displaying the name and the symbol of the selected candidate.
It then drops the paper into a sealed box within the machine.
According to Supreme Court guidelines, the ECI verifies VVPAT slips in five randomly selected polling stations in each assembly constituency.
