From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Monday direced the Election Commission of India (ECI) to file a reply within three weeks on a plea by NGO Association of Democratic Reforms seeking to tally the count in the electronic voting machines with the VVPATs.
Are we not sometimes over suspicious, asked a bench comprising Justices Sanjay Khanna and Bela M Trivedi. Advocate Prashant Bhushan representing the NGO contended that sime times the registered and the vote counts do not match, pointing out tht only few VVPATs were being tallied with EVM vote counts and not all.
The plea said: “The requirement of the voter verifying is met with the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing the button of the EVM through a transparent window for the voter to verify that his vote has been recorded as casst on the internally printed VVPAT slip before it falls into the ballot box.”
It said there is no way for any voter to verify that his individual vote has actually been “counted as recorded” because there is no procedure provided to match the VVPATS that they had certified as being “recorded as cast” with what is actually counted.
The NGO has sought direction to the Election Commission to ensure that the voters are able to verify through VVPATs that their votes have been “counted as recorded.”
The plea contended that during the 2019 general elections, there were ECI acknowledged instances of variance in the results captured in the EVMs and VVPATs. It illustrated that during the mandatory verification of paper slips of VVPAT in case of 05 randomly selected polling stations, in polling station No 63 of Mydukur assembly constituency in Andhra Pradesh, the returning officer officially verified that there was a discrepancy of 14 votes in the EVM and VVPAT counts as the EVM showed 233 votes count whereas the VVPAT showed 219 votes. In other words, 6% of the counted votes in the EVM had not been cast.
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