SC junks plea for 100% EVM-VVPAT matching, allows verification of 5% EVMS on complaints

Says giving physical access to VVPAT slips to voters problematic, impractical; junks plea for paper ballot revival

As India voted in the second phase of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a batch of petitions seeking 100 per cent cross-verification of votes cast using Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips. It said the possibility of hacking or tampering with the agnostic firmware in the burnt memory of EVMs to tutor or favour results is unfounded. It, however, issued a series of directions to strengthen the existing system.

Giving its vote of trust to the EVM, a two-judge bench of Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna said: “We have discussed, elaborately, all protocols and technical aspects (and) we reject all pleas. Blindly distrusting a system can lead to unwarranted suspicions.”

It also maintained that “democracy is all about striving to build harmony and trust between all institutions”.

The court also rejected a plea to return to paper ballots.

It added that in the Indian context, keeping in view the vast size of the electorate of nearly 97 crore, the number of candidates who contest the elections, the number of polling booths and the problems faced with ballot papers, the court would be undoing the electoral reforms by directing the reintroduction of ballot papers.

“EVMs offer significant advantages. They have effectively eliminated booth capturing by restricting the rate of vote casting to four votes per minute, thereby prolonging the time needed and thus check insertion of bogus votes,” it said, adding that EVMs have eliminated invalid votes, which were a major issue with paper ballots and had often sparked disputes during the counting process.

It also rejected the plea that sought the right of the voter to physically verify the printed slip from the VVPAT machine and put it in the ballot box for counting.