The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed all the petitions seeking 100 per cent verification of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) votes with their Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.
A two-judge bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta pronounced the verdict. Significantly, the Court had earlier reserved its judgement on the petitions for April 18 after two days of hearing. However, it had again listed the matter for discussion on April 24 to understand the workings of the EVMs with the ECI.
Supreme Court said that there are two concurring verdicts on pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with VVPAT.
Apex Court's 2 big directions on EVMs, symbol units
The Court said it has given two directions — one direction is after the completion of symbol loading process, the Symbol Loading Unit (SLU) should be sealed and they should be stored at least for 45 days.
Second direction issued by Supreme Court is that there will be option for candidates to get the microcontroller program of EVMs to be checked by a team of engineers after the declaration of results, such a request is to be made by the candidate within seven days after the declaration of results.
On Wednesday, during the hearing, the bench sought answers to certain technical queries linked to the functioning of EVMs, including whether the microcontrollers fitted in them are reprogrammable.
Upon the court's listing of the queries, the ECI sought detailed clarifications. On the security feature, the ECI asserted that the EVMs cannot be tampered with in any circumstance and that the complete counting of the VVPAT slips was not practically possible.
Responding to a question on the reprogramming of the microcontroller, the ECI said, "All the microcontrollers are one time programmable. They are burnt at the time of manufacturing. They cannot be changed."
"All the three units, CU, BU, VVPAT, have their own microcontrollers. These microcontrolers are housed in it. They cannot be accessed physically. The one-time program is burnt into them, the ECI added."
Meanwhile, Advocate Prashant Bhushan appearing on the behalf of the one of the petioner. Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) (petioner), alleged the EC official's statement was not fully correct. Bhushan backed his statement while citing a report by a private body to back his contention.
"The report says that the kind of memory used in these three units can be reprogrammed. A malicious programme can easily be uploaded at the time of symbol loading," Advocate Prashant Bhushan alleged. He added that efforts should be made to remove doubts about the transparency of EVMs.
It is pertinent to note that, as per the current practice, the ECI randomly verifies the VVPAT slips of EVMs from five polling booths per assembly segment in a parliamentary constituency.
