EVM-VVPAT Case: Supreme Court Likely to Pronounce Verdict Today; What We Know So Far

The Supreme Court of India is all set to pronounce a verdict on Wednesday, April 24, on EVM with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). The batch of the apex court on petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of vote count in EVM-VVPAT.

A Bench headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna had reserved the case for judgment on April 18. The VVPAT is an independent vote verification system which enables electors to see whether their votes have been cast correctly.

NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), one of the petitioners in the case sought a reversal of 2017 election commission's decision to replace the transparent glass on VVPAT machines with an opaque glass through which a voter can see the slip only when the light is on for seven seconds.

Also Read | EVM-VVPAT Hearing: Human Intervention Creates Problems, Says Supreme Court.

The ADR has sought to match the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably "recorded as cast" and ensure the voter can verify through the VVPAT slip that his vote, as recorded on the paper slip, has been "counted as recorded."

The apex court asked petitioners, who sought its direction to go back to using ballot papers, not to suspect the efficacy of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) and to appreciate if the election commission does good work.

The bench understands the functioning of EVMs after interacting with senior deputy election commissioner Nitesh Kumar Vyas. The bench told advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the NGO, that voter satisfaction and trust are at the core of the electoral process, news agency PTI reported

Senior advocate Maninder Singh, appearing for the ECI, had submitted that EVMs are standalone machines and cannot be tampered with but the possibility of human error cannot be ruled out.