Supreme Court rejects plea seeking review of VVPAT-EVM verification verdict

Supreme Court has dismissed a petition seeking review of its judgement rejecting plea for 100 per cent verification of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) votes with their Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta dismissed the review petition, saying no case for review of the April 26 judgement is made out.

"We have carefully perused the review petition, as also the grounds in support thereof. In our opinion, no case for review of the judgement dated April 26, 2024 is made out. The review petition is, accordingly, dismissed," the bench stated in its July 25 order.

The review petition filed by Arun Kumar Agarwal contended that there are mistakes and errors apparent in the April 26 judgment.

The review petition had stated, "It is not correct to state that the result will be unreasonably delayed (by tallying EVM votes with VVPAT slips) or the manpower required will be double of that already deployed... Existing CCTV surveillance of counting halls would ensure that manipulation and mischief do not occur in VVPAT slip counting."

The petitioner had sought a review of the April 26 judgement by which it declined the petitions which sought cross-verification by the voters of votes cast by them as "counted as recorded" in the EVMs with VVPAT.

However, in the review petition, the petitioner stated, "Electronic voting machines do not allow voters to verify that their votes have been accurately recorded. Furthermore, given their very nature, electronic voting machines are especially vulnerable to malicious changes by insiders such as designers, programmers, manufacturers, maintenance technicians, etc."

"Therefore, in light of the above, there are apparent errors on the face of the impugned order dated April 26, 2024, and the impugned judgement, is liable to be reviewed," it added.

In its judgement on April 26, the apex court also rejected petitioners' prayer to revert back to the paper ballot voting system.

The verdict of the top court came on petitions that sought cross-verification by the voters of votes cast by them as "counted as recorded" in the EVMs with VVPAT.

Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Arun Kumar Aggarwal, among others had filed petitions in the top court seeking more extensive verification of EVMs data against VVPAT records.

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