SC Seeks ECI Response On Plea Seeking Counting Of All VVPAT Slips

llThe Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Election Commission of India and Centre on a petition seeking the counting of all Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips in elections, instead of the verification of only 5 randomly selected (Electronic Voting Machines) EVMs in each assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency.

A bench of Justices BR Gavai and Sandeep Mehta tagged the petition with another plea filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms seeking similar reliefs.

The petition filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal further challenged ECI's guideline that mandates that VVPAT verification shall be done sequentially, i.e. one after the other, causing undue delay.

The petition contended, "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 5-6 hours."

The petition filed through advocate Neha Rathi further stated that while the government has spent around Rs 5000 crores on the purchase of nearly 24 lakh VVPATs, presently VVPAT slips of only approximately 20,000 VVPATs are verified.

"Given that many questions are being raised by experts with regard to VVPATS and EVMs and the fact that large number of discrepancies between EVM and VVPAT vote count have been reported in the past, it is imperative that all VVPATs slips are counted and the voter is given an opportunity to properly verify that his vote as cast in the ballot is also counted by allowing him. to physically drop his/her VVPAT slip on the ballot box," the plea added.

It sought direction that the ECI mandatorily cross-verify the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably 'recorded as cast' by the voter through the VVPATs by counting all VVPAT paper slips.

ECI to allow the voter to physically drop VVPAT slip as generated by the VVPAT in a ballot box to ensure that the voter's ballot has been 'counted as recorded'," it demanded.

(ANI)