‘Are We Not Over-Suspicious’: Supreme Court While Hearing PIL For Tallying VVPAT Slips With EVM Votes

The Supreme Court on Monday (17 July) heard a plea by Association for Democratic Reforms to tally Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips with the votes cast through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) so that citizens can confirm that their vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ and ‘recorded as cast’.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Bela M Trivedi however strongly remarked that the public interest litigations regarding the election process sometimes cast too much suspicion on the sanctity of the election process.

Association for Democratic Reforms was represented by Prashant Bhushan. The bench questioned him and stated, “Mr. Bhushan, are we not sometimes over-suspicious?”.

To which Bhushan remarked that at present there is no mechanism to ensure that votes of citizens have been cast, recorded and verified. He argued that such verification should be declared a fundamental rights of the citizens.

The bench directed that a copy be served to the Standing Counsel for the Election Commission of India. The registry was asked to examine if the plea can be clubbed with other petitions before the Supreme Court.

In April 2019, the Supreme Court had directed that the number of EVMs with respect to the VVPAT trail be raised from 1 EVM to 5 EVMs per Assembly Segment/Assembly Constituency.