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"We don't want to go into it. We all know the drawbacks of the system of ballot papers," the bench orally observed
The Supreme Court on Tuesday, April 16, 2024 expressed serious reservations over use of ballot papers or 100% counting of VVPATs during the elections in the country.
"Fortunately, we have not forgotten what we saw in the 60s," a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta said.
"We don't want to go into it. We all know the drawbacks of the system of ballot papers," the bench added.
The court was hearing a batch of PILs including one by NGO Association for Democratic Reforms for increasing the VVPAT counts "in order to restore confidence of the voters".
A number of counsel led by advocate Prashant Bhushan cited the decision of the constitutional court in Germany against the use of EVMs. Due to unreliability of EVMs, this court directed for VVPAT in Subramanian Swamy case, he said.
"What is the population of Germany? Our country can't be compared with any European country. The population of even my state, West Bengal, is greater than any of the European countries. We need to repose some trust and faith on somebody. Do not try to bring down the system like this," Justice Datta observed.
The bench also orally observed that counting votes in India is a humongous task.
Bhushan referred to a private survey to contend that as the majority of voters don't trust EVMs then why not count all VVPATs as it would not take more than 12 hours.
"Let's not go by private surveys," the bench said.
The court said the private surveys can't be relied upon in such cases, while pointing out that the number of voters in the country was about 98 Crores.
During the hearing, the bench also asked senior advocate Maninder Singh appearing for the Election Commission of India whether after voting is done, the machine can be put to some technical inspections and as to what the level of human intervention is after the polling.
The bench fixed the matter for further hearing on Thursday.
On April 1, 2024, the Supreme Court had issued notice to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the writ petition demanding mandatory cross-verification of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.
The petition, filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal, sought a direction to ensure that all VVPAT slips are counted alongside the votes cast electronically. The plea filed through advocate Neha Rathi sought a direction for a comprehensive count of VVPAT slips, challenging the current practice of verifying only five randomly selected EVMs through VVPAT paper slips.
The petition further challenged the EC's guideline which mandated that VVPAT verification shall be done sequentially, i.e. one after the other, causing undue delay.
It contended that if simultaneous verification is done and more number of officers are deployed for counting in each assembly constituency, then complete VVPAT verification can be done in matter of five-six hours.
The plea stated that while the government has spent nearly Rs 5000 Crores on purchase of nearly 24 lakh VVPATs, presently VVPAT slips of only approximately 20,000 are verified.
Case Title: Association for Democratic Reforms Vs Election Commission of India & Ors
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