SC asks Oppn to reply to EC VVPAT claim

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and 20 other Opposition leaders to respond to a claim made by the Election Commission that raising VVPAT match to 50% of total votes in EVMs would take additional days to complete the counting of election results.

"The counting is scheduled on May 23. You have sufficient time to file your rejoinder," a bench presided over by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi told senior advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for the opposition leaders.

The court put the matter for consideration on April 8.

The Election Commission had on Friday told the court that 50% VVPAT slip verification in each assembly segment of a Parliamentary Constituency or Assembly Constituency on an average would enlarge the time required for counting to about six days.

It maintained its “confidence and satisfaction” with the present rule of VVPAT slip verification of one randomly selected polling station per Assembly Constituency or Assembly Segment (in case of Parliamentary Constituencies), saying this was based on the secure design of EVMs and the elaborate procedural safeguards adopted for its usage.

“Any further increase in the sample size of verification will lead to a very negligible gain in the confidence level, which currently is way above 99.9936%. It is pertinent to mention in this context that till date no mismatch has been detected in mock polls or in the verification of VVPAT slips carried out at 1500 polling stations” the panel said in its 49-page affidavit.

The court had earlier asked the Election Commission to tell what "insurmountable difficulty" it would face if the court ordered it to increase matching of VVPAT with EVM counts from the current system of one polling station in one Assembly segment.

It also reminded the EC that there should always be room for improvement as it was a question of satisfaction for the voters.

The court also asked why did it require orders from the Supreme Court in 2013 for the EC to introduce the VVPAT system. “Why didn't the EC bring VVPAT on its own,” it asked.

The plea was filed by several opposition leaders, including Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, Sharad Pawar, K C Venugopal, Derek Obrain, Sharad Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav, Satish Chandra Mishra, M K Stalin, T K Rangarajan, Manoj K Jha, Farooq Abdullah, S S Reddy, Danish Ali, Ajit Singh, Mohd Badruddin Ajmal, Jitin Ram Majhi, and others.

Voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines are used in all polling stations but results of EVMs and VVPATs are matched in one polling station per constituency.

The petitioners urged that the EC should ensure that 50% of the EVM results were matched and cross-checked with VVPATs before it declared the results in the Lok Sabha election.