Supreme Court’s Notice to Election Commission on Verifying Electronic Voting

The Plea Seeks Tallying of All EVM Votes With VVPAT

Newsreel Asia Insight #179
April 2, 2024

The Supreme Court has issued a notice to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on a petition demanding a comprehensive count of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips in elections, challenging the current practice of verifying only a subset of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in each assembly segment.

VVPAT is a method that provides feedback to voters using a ballotless voting system. It is an independent verification system for EVMs that allows voters to verify that their votes are cast as intended.

When a voter presses a button on the EVM for the candidate of their choice, the VVPAT generates a paper slip, which contains the name, serial number and symbol of the candidate chosen by the voter. It’s displayed behind a transparent window for the voter to see. The voter cannot take the paper slip with them. It serves only as a verification tool for the voter to ensure their vote has been accurately recorded by the EVM. After the voter has viewed the slip, it automatically falls into a sealed container attached to the VVPAT machine. This container can only be opened during the vote counting process. In case of a dispute or for random verification, these paper slips can be counted to check against the electronic tally of the EVM.

The Bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and Sandeep Mehta, while addressing the plea, also considered a related petition by the Association for Democratic Reforms, which calls for similar measures.

The petition, spearheaded by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal, critiques the ECI’s guideline for sequential VVPAT verification, advocating for a simultaneous process to expedite the counting, as reported by Live Law. The petitioner refers to the substantial investment in VVPAT technology, with nearly 50 billion rupees spent on around 2.4 million units, yet only about 20,000 are currently verified. The plea states there is a need for full VVPAT counting to ensure electoral integrity, given the discrepancies reported between EVM and VVPAT counts in past elections.

Senior Advocate Gopal Sankarnarayanan and Neha Rathi represented the petitioner. The petition seeks to mandate the ECI to cross-verify EVM counts with VVPAT slips, abolish the sequential verification guideline, allow voters to physically deposit VVPAT slips into a ballot box, and enhance the visibility of the VVPAT slip confirmation process.

The Supreme Court’s engagement with this issue follows a history of legal scrutiny over VVPAT and EVM verification methods. Prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, opposition parties had petitioned the Court for increased VVPAT verification, leading to a directive that raised the number of EVMs tallied with VVPAT from one to five per assembly segment.

“Leaders like Chandrababu Naidu and Mamata Banerjee were up in arms against the EVMs and VVPAT alleging malfunctions and manipulations by the ruling government,” reported India Today at the time.

In July 2023, a parliamentary panel highlighted that the Union government had not yet provided information promised four years earlier regarding discrepancies between EVMs and VVPAT tallies from the 2019 elections, as reported by The Wire. The Committee on Government Assurances, after reviewing pending matters of the Law and Justice Ministry, noted the lack of response to a 2019 query about EVM and VVPAT count discrepancies and subsequent actions. Despite multiple follow-ups by the Law Ministry to the Election Commission, the requested details remained unprovided. The committee emphasised the importance of addressing such discrepancies for election security.

The demand for 100% VVPAT verification has been met with resistance, citing practical difficulties and the potential for procedural delays.

The ECI’s stance, as reflected in previous court interactions, suggests a cautious approach to altering the existing VVPAT verification framework. Justice Sanjiv Khanna, in a related hearing, pointed out the challenges of full-scale VVPAT verification, hinting at the logistical and operational burdens it would impose on the electoral body.