The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday (March 18) asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) to meet with Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra and representatives of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and hear their demand to upload on its official website authenticated, scanned and legible account of votes recorded booth wise after each phase of polling.
Both Moitra and ADR are petitioners, seeking the uploading of scanned legible copies of Form 17C (account of votes recorded) from all polling stations after every phase of polling in the General Elections 2024, reported The Hindu.
Senior advocate Maninder Singh, who appeared for the ECI, said that it was “ready and willing” to hear the petitioners’ representations on the issue.
On Tuesday, a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna directed the petitioners to make their representation before the ECI in the next 10 days.
Earlier, in an affidavit in the Supreme Court, the ECI had said that there was no such “legal mandate” to provide the voter turnout data to any person other than electoral candidates or their polling agents.
“Citizens have a right to know. The Supreme Court had intervened in other cases to ensure that citizens knew the criminal antecedents of candidates… In a democracy, we need to know, that’s all,” said advocate Prashant Bhushan, who appeared for the petitioners.