SC reserves judgment on plea seeking cross verification of EVM votes with VVPAT

SC reserves plea on EVM-VVPAT tally for judgment

The Supreme Court on April 18 reserved a plea seeking  cross-verification of the votes cast in electronic voting machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) for judgment.

Over a period of two days, the court heard various lawyers representing the petitioners, an official from the Election Commission of India (ECI) and senior advocate Maninder Singh, who appeared for the ECI.

On April 16, SC dismissed the request of the petitioners to revert back to paper ballot and observed that it would not be practical for a country the size of India to return to paper ballots, considering the population sizes and other factors.

A bench comprising justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Dutta said "What is the population of Germany and what is the population of India ? We are in our 60s now and we know what used to happen earlier when there were paper ballots." Dipankar Dutta further observed that his home state West Bengal has more population than Germany.
"We need to repose some trust and faith on somebody. Do not try to bring down the system like this," Dutta added.

What is VVPAT?

The reliability of VVPAT systems has been questioned for a while. Many critics have cited instances of malfunctioning printers, paper jams, and discrepancies between electronic and paper records.

VVPAT, which was introduced for the time in India in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, is a ballot-less vote verification system connected with the EVM. When a voter casts their vote using an EVM, the VVPAT system generates a paper slip containing the name and symbol of the candidate for whom the vote was cast. The paper slip can be viewed by the voter. This allows the individual to verify whether the vote was cast correctly on the EVM.

This is not the first time that the matter has reached the top court. On April 8, 2019, the Supreme Court directed the electoral commission to raise the number of EVMs subjected to VVPAT physical verification from one to five per assembly segment in a Lok Sabha constituency.