The Election Commission of India has strongly advocated for the use of electronic voting machines during polls, saying that due to technological measures, along with strict administrative and security procedures laid out by the ECI, no unauthorised person can get access to EVMs.
Filing a voluminous 469-page affidavit through its Counsel Amit Sharma in the Supreme Court on Monday, in response to a petition seeking complete verification of EVM data against Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) records, the poll panel said it was a ‘regressive’ thought, which would mean going back to the old paper ballot system.
As per the poll panel, manual counting of this scale would not only be labour and time-intensive, but also also prone to human error and mischief, leaving aside the drudgery of days of counting small slips of paper potent with possibilities of mischievous false narratives on social media, round after round of counting across the country.
It explained that theoretically there may be discrepancy between the EVM count and the VVPAT slips count, but practically there was no possibility of any discrepancy between the EVM count and the VVPAT slips count, except in case of an human error in counting the VVPAT slips.
As per the affidavit, counting of 100 percent Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips in EVMs would be against the spirit of the use of EVM.
As per the affidavit, there was no ‘fundamental right’ of the voters to verify through VVPATS that their votes had been ‘recorded as cast’ and ‘counted as recorded,’ a direction sought in the plea filed by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) through Advocate Prashant Bhushan.
The petition sought cross verifying the counts in EVMs with VVPATs in all polling booths, which was limited to five polling stations per Assembly constituency at present.
Terming the direction sought in the plea for raising the number of VVPAT verification as ‘misconceived’ and ‘devoid of merits,’ the Commission said the provisions of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 did not violate any fundamental right and in fact the concerned provisions have undergone judicial scrutiny at many occasions and their constitutionality has been upheld time and again.
The constitutional body termed the present petition as yet another attempt to cast doubt over the functioning of EVMs/VVPATS with ‘vague and baseless grounds’.
It further said that VVPAT was essentially an ‘audit trail’ for the voters to instantaneously verify their votes cast in the ballot unit.
As per the affidavit, the ECI-EVM had an inbuilt system of recording each vote (candidate button number pressed by the voter on Ballot Unit) with date and time stamp, which can be retrieved by using decoder or printer (customised) based on orders of the courts.
Till date, ballot slips of 34,680 randomly selected VVPATs have been tallied with the electronic counts of their CUs, and not a single case of transfer of vote meant for candidate ‘A’ to candidate ‘B’ has been detected, noted the Commission.
The poll body said it has put in place stringent technical and administrative safeguards for the EVMS so that the machines could not be tampered or manipulated to any extent whatsoever.
It apprised the Apex Court that all election activities related to the EVMS were carried out in the presence of political parties/candidates in the most transparent manner. The Commission termed EVMs as totally ‘stand-alone’ machines having One Time Programmable (OTP) chips, which could not be hacked or tampered with.
As per the affidavit, since the introduction of VVPATs, more than 118 crore voters have cast their votes with full satisfaction and only 25 complaints have been received under Rule 49MA, which were all found to be false.