New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday will pronounce a verdict on petitions, which cast doubts on EVMs and sought 100% EVM-VVPAT verification. On Wednesday, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta reserved its verdict on a batch of pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), after considering the answers to queries it had posed to the Election Commission of India (ECI).
During the hearing, the apex court had said that it cannot "control the elections" or issue directions simply because doubts have been raised about the efficacy of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM). The petitioners’ have claimed that the polling devices can be tinkered with to manipulate the results. The apex court sought answers from an official of the poll panel to five questions related to the functioning of EVMs, including whether the microcontrollers fitted in them are reprogrammable.
Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Nitesh Kumar Vyas, who had earlier made a presentation before the court on the functioning of EVMs, appeared again before the court to answer the queries. In response to the question about microcontrollers, the ECI’s officer said they are one-time programmable at the time of manufacture and installed in all three units of EVMs, the balloting unit, VVPAT and the control unit. He stressed that they cannot be reprogrammed thereafter.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing the NGO 'Association for Democratic Reforms', argued that the ECI’s officer statement was not fully correct and referred to a report by a private body to back his contention. Bhushan said that the report says that the kind of memory used in these three units can be reprogrammed and a malicious programme can easily be uploaded at the time of symbol loading. Justice Khanna told Bhushan that the court has to rely on the data and information provided by the ECI, which is a constitutional body, and the ECI says the programme in the memory of an EVM can be written only once.
The bench told Bhushan, "If you are prejudiced or predisposed about something, then we cannot help it. We cannot change your thought process,". Justice Datta said, "Can we issue a mandamus (directions) based on a suspicion? The report you (Bhushan) are relying on goes on to say that there is no incident of manipulation yet. We can't control the elections. We are not the controlling authority of another constitutional authority."
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