A plea has been filed before the Supreme Court seeking review of its April 26 judgment in the EVM-VVPAT case, in which the court had dismissed petitions seeking the complete verification of votes cast using Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.
A two-judge bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta had also rejected a demand to go back to ballot papers in elections.
The review petition, filed by Arun Kumar Agrawal, stated that there are mistakes and errors apparent on the face of the impugned order and as such there are sufficient reasons which require review of the April 26 judgment.
The petitioner has sought review of the following issues:
– Feasibility of counting of all VVPAT paper slips in terms of time to be taken and additional manpower
– Vulnerability of SLU (symbol loading units)
– Percentage of VVPAT slips counted for tallying with EVM votes after Chandrababu Naidu (2019) judgment
The plea stated that the judgement notes that presently 5 per cent of the VVPAT paper slips are tallied with votes cast. However, it’s been claimed that the said figure is factually incorrect and in fact, less than 2 per cent of the VVPAT slips are counted for verification of EVMs.
The petitioner has submitted that electronic voting machines do not allow voters to verify that their votes have been accurately recorded. Furthermore, given their very nature, electronic voting machines are especially vulnerable to malicious changes by insiders such as designers, programmers, manufacturers, maintenance technicians, etc.
On April 26, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta had termed the suspicion of manipulation of the EVMs “unfounded” and trashed the demand for reverting to the old paper ballot system.
Source Agencies
