Review petition filed against SC judgment junking 100% tally of EVM votes with VVPAT slips

Review filed against SC's EVM VVPAT judgment

A petition has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking review of its judgment dismissing cross-verification of the votes cast in electronic voting machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) .

The petition has been filed by a person named Arun Kumar Agarwal, who contended that there are mistakes and errors apparent on the face the apex court's April 2024 judgment.

Referring to the portion of the judgement, which noted that counting VVPAT slips will be difficult owing to the time involved in it and the delay in declaring the results, the plea said "counting of the slips after they have been sorted candidate-wise, is in fact easier than counting normal paper because the VVPAT paper slip is slightly curled on account of being thermally printed from a roll".

The plea also stated that the counting of all VVPAT votes can be done with a fraction of employees at a fraction of costs.

Agarwal has also contended that the Election Commission of India (ECI) is wrong in saying that an average of 1,000 votes are polled. The plea contended that based on data provided by ECI, it is noted that in 2019 approximately 61.4 crore individuals votes were polled and in 2024 there are approximately 97 crore registered voters. It is known that in 2019 there were 92 crore registered voters. It said: "Thus, with 92 crores registered voters votes polled were 61.4 crores. Hence, with 97 crore registered voters in 2024, it can be safely estimated that approximately 68 crores individuals would cast their vote in 2024 elections."

According to the plea, the apex court did not consider the fact that Symbol Loading Units (SLU) can have extra bytes other than necessary images which can be misused. Thus, the court should have considered the fact that SLU is vulnerable and needs to be audited.

On April 26, the apex court junked a plea to tally EVM votes with VVPAT votes, however, it had given the ECI a few directions to enhance the confidence in EVMs.

The judgment said: "One direction is after the completion of symbol loading process, the Symbol Loading Unit should be sealed. The SLU should be stored at least for a period of 45 days. The burnt memory in the microcontroller EVM shall be checked by a team of engineers after the declaration of results on a request by candidates in serial number 2 and 3, such a request to be made within 7 days after the declaration of results."