SC to hear on April 16 pleas for cross verification of votes cast with VVPAT slips
New Delhi: The Supreme Court said on Tuesday it will hear on April 16 a batch of pleas seeking cross-verification of the votes cast with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).
The VVPAT is an independent vote verification system which enables an elector to see whether his vote was cast correctly. It generates a paper slip which can be viewed by the voter. It is kept in a sealed cover and can be opened in case of a dispute.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta, which could not take up the petitions related to Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), said it will consider all pleas in the matter for hearing on next Tuesday.
The seven-phase Lok Sabha polls will begin on April 19.
In July last year, the apex court asked the Election Commission of India to respond to the plea.
The NGO had sought direction from the Election Commission and the Centre to ensure the voters are able to verify through VVPATs that their vote has been “counted as recorded”.
Declare unconstitutional the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 and the practice and procedure of the Election Commission of India (ECI) to the extent that they violate the fundamental right of the voters to verify through VVPATs that their vote has been “recorded as cast” and “counted as recorded”, the plea said.
The requirement of the voters verifying that their votes have been “recorded as cast” is somewhat met when the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing the button on the EVM through a transparent window for the voters to verify that their vote has been recorded on the internally printed VVPAT slip before the slip falls into the ‘ballot box’, it stated.
It said there is a complete vacuum in law as the poll panel has provided no procedure for the voter to verify that his or her vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ which is an indispensable part of voter verifiability.
