In response to a petition calling for the counting of all Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips in elections rather than just five randomly chosen Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in each assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency, the Supreme Court on Monday sent notice to the Election Commission.
Arun Kumar Aggarwal, an activist and lawyer, filed a plea. The poll body was notified by a panel of Justices BR Gavai and Sandeep Mehta, who linked it to a similar appeal filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), an NGO, asking for comparable reliefs.
The Supreme Court Advocate-on-Record Neha Rathi filed the petition, which challenges the Election Commission’s guidelines requiring sequential, or one after the other, VVPAT verification, hence incurring unnecessary delay.
It said that the entire VVPAT verification process could be completed in five to six hours if simultaneous verification was carried out and more personnel were assigned to count in each assembly constituency.
The plea further claimed that only about 20,000 of the almost 24 lakh VVPATs that the government had purchased for nearly Rs 5,000 crore had their VVPAT slips authenticated as of yet.
“It is imperative that all VVPAT slips are counted and the voter is given an opportunity to properly verify that his vote cast in the ballot is also counted by allowing him or her to physically drop his or her VVPAT slip on the ballot box,” the petition stated.
