New Delhi. A heated debate was witnessed in the Supreme Court on Tuesday when senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan raised questions about the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and demanded the return of the ballot papers. The apex court expressed displeasure over this and said that the electoral process in India is a ‘huge task’ and no attempt should be made to ‘weaken the system’. The court also mentioned how polling stations were captured during the voting phase to manipulate the election results.
The top court was hearing petitions requesting full verification of votes cast using ‘Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail’ (VVPAT) with EVMs. VVPAT is an independent vote verification system that enables a voter to see whether his or her vote has been cast correctly. A bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta criticized the argument that many European countries have returned to voting through ballot paper after testing voting machines.
Justice Dutta told lawyer Prashant Bhushan, appearing for NGO ‘Association for Democratic Reforms’, “This (elections in India) is a huge task. No European country will be able to do this. You talked about Germany but what is the population there? My home state West Bengal is more populous than Germany. We have to maintain faith and trust in the electoral process. Don’t try to weaken the system like this.”
Citing the example of Germany, Bhushan had advocated returning to holding elections through ballot paper. The bench said that there are approximately 98 crore registered voters in India. “There may be some discrepancy in vote counting due to some human errors, but this can be prevented and corrected,” it said. Referring to booth capturing in the past, Justice Khanna said, “Bhushan, we all have seen the 60s. We have seen what happened earlier when there were no EVMs. “We don’t need to tell you this.”
The bench questioned the Election Commission officials present in the court about the functioning of EVMs, their storage and the possibility of data manipulation. “We want you to inform us about every detail from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ about the EVMs,” the bench told senior lawyer Maninder Singh, appearing for the commission. Bhushan said that he also wants that every voter should be allowed to collect the slip of the vote cast from the VVPAT machine and put it in the ballot box.
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Tags: EVM, prashant bhushan, Supreme Court, VVPAT
FIRST PUBLISHED: April 16, 2024, 23:14 IST