Nagaon, Apr 25 (ANI): Polling officers gather the EVMs, VVPATs and different polling supplies for his or her respective polling cubicles on the eve of the second part of the Lok Sabha polls, in Nagaon on Thursday. (ANI Photo)
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The Supreme Court will pass directions on petitions searching for 100% cross-verification of vote depend in digital voting machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips in the present day. The Bench headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna on April 18 had reserved the case for judgment.
The Bench heard a batch of petitions which sought instructions to tally Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips with votes solid by way of digital voting machines (EVMs) through the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.
Also learn: SC says EVM microcontrollers are ‘agnostic’, do not recognise parties or candidates, only buttons
The petitioners, together with the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), asserted that voters have the elemental proper to really feel assured concerning the electoral course of. They additionally argued that 97 crore registered voters within the nation had a proper to a extra clear electoral system, with or with out EVMs.
The VVPAT machine is hooked up to the poll unit of the EVM and prints out a slip of paper with the voter’s selection as soon as the vote is solid. The slip is seen for seven seconds for the voter to confirm if their vote was solid appropriately earlier than it falls right into a compartment saved beneath. Polling officers use these slips to confirm votes solid. Not all votes are verified, polling officers use the VVPAT slips to confirm votes solid in 5 randomly chosen polling cubicles.
Also learn: What is the EVM-VVPAT verification issue before the Supreme Court? | Explained
The petitioners have demanded cross-verifying all of the votes solid on the EVM with VVPAT paper slips to accord extra credibility to the polling course of. Highlighting that there exists a threat of manipulation, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan identified that each EVMS and VVPATs have a “programmable chip” and that the ECI has beforehand denied sharing their “source code” on the bottom that they represent the mental property of the producers.
The ECI stated it matched EVM votes with greater than four crore VVPAT slips and famous that no discrepancies have been recorded until now. It asserted that it’s not possible to manipulate EVMs.
Also learn: EVMs can neither be hacked nor tampered with, ECI tells SC
The ECI stated EVMs can neither be hacked nor tampered with and that the EVMs are “totally stand-alone machines having one-time programmable chips”. It additionally stated that counting 100% VVPAT slips would pose a “great difficulty”, saying it might take an hour to depend the slips from one VVPAT alone. It additionally stated it obtained solely 25 complaints, and all had been discovered false. It additionally informed the Court that the EVM producers didn’t know which button could be allotted to which candidate, or the constituency to which the machine could be despatched