New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice on a petition filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal seeking complete count of VVPAT slips in elections, as opposed to the current practice of verification of only 5 randomly selected EVMs through VVPAT paper slips.
A bench led by justice B R Gavai sought response from Election Commission of India and Union of India after hearing submissions from senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayana, representing the petitioner.
The plea, filed through advocate Neha Rathi, challenged the Election Commission’s guideline that mandates that VVPAT verification shall be done sequentially, i.e. one after the other, and added that it causes undue delay. The petition submitted that ECI can easily deploy 150 officers in teams of 3 to count paper slips from 50 VVPAT simultaneously and complete the counting in 5 hours as opposed to sequential (one by one) counting of each VVPAT which, as per ECI’s own submissions, would take 250 hours i.e. almost 11-12 days.
“There is no plausible reason for not counting all the paper slips of the VVPAT when the same can be done within hours on the day of the counting. The only reason given by the Election Commission while opposing 50% of the physical count in N. Chandrababu Naidu v. Union of India, was that it was time-consuming and would take 6 to 8 days to count 50% of the votes, which in the respectful submission of the petitioner herein is not true”, said the plea.
The plea said the cross-verification and counting of all VVPAT slips is essential to the interest of democracy and the principle that elections must not only be free and fair, but also be seen to be free.
“Guideline 14.7(h) of Manual on EVM and VVPAT, 2023 issued by ECI states to Conduct the Verification count of the VVPAT paper slip of the randomly selected 5(five) polling stations sequentially i.e. one after another. The sequential verification count of VVPAT slips is completely arbitrary, has no proximity with the objective of verification count of VVPAT slips and is devoid of any rationale”, said the plea.
“Election should not only be fair but should also be seen to be fair as the Right to information has been held to be part of fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression in terms of Article 19(1)(a) and 21 of the Constitution of India. The voter has right under Article 19 and 21 to cross verify his vote as casted by him and counted by paper vote of VVPAT in accordance with the purport and object of directions of this Hon’ble Court in Subramanian Swamy v. Election Commission of India, (2013)”, said the plea.
The plea sought a direction to ECI to 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.
The plea also sought a direction to the 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’.
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