The apex courtroom now posted the case for listening to on April 18.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday, whereas listening to pleas searching for cross-verification of the votes forged with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) raised doubts in regards to the petitioners contentions in regards to the feasibility of the bodily counting of votes given the big inhabitants of India. A bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta was not satisfied with advocate Prashant Bhushan’s arguments to return to election through poll paper as an alternative of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
Justice Sanjiv Khanna stated, “We are in our 60s. We all know what happened when there were ballot papers; you may have, but we have not forgotten.” The apex courtroom rejected the arguments of Bhushan, showing for the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), about how most European international locations that had opted for voting by way of EVMs have returned to paper ballots.
As Bhushan cited what’s Germany’s instance, the bench requested in regards to the inhabitants of the nation, to which advocate replied that it’s round five-six crore. Justice Khanna stated that 97 crore is the entire variety of registered voters in India.
“My home state, West Bengal, has more population than Germany. We need to repose some trust and faith on somebody. Do not try to bring down the system like this,” Justice Datta informed petitioners’ counsels.
The bench additionally stated that human intervention within the polling and counting course of may result in additional issues and biases.
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It added, “Normally, human interventions lead to problems and human weakness can be there which includes biases as well. Machines, normally without human intervention, will give you accurate results. Yes, the problem arises when there is human intervention or someone makes unauthorised changes when they are around the software or machine. If you have any suggestions to avert this, then you can give us that.”
The apex courtroom now posted the case for listening to on April 18.
During the listening to, the highest courtroom additionally posed some inquiries to the Election Commission of India (ECI) and requested whether or not CCTV cameras are put in in any respect polling cubicles. The official of ECI current by way of video-conferencing informed the bench that CCTV cameras are put in in 50 p.c of polling cubicles.
It additionally requested whether or not there’s any regulation offering for punishment of officers and authorities for manipulating EVMs and opined that until there’s concern of stringent punishment, there’s at all times chance of a manipulation.
It informed ECI, “Suppose there is some manipulation what the punishment prescribed. That is serious thing. There should be a fear that if something wrong is done then there will be punishment.” On a question, the ECI official informed the bench that the machines are sealed within the presence of the representatives of the candidates and that they’re stored in a tamper-proof situation. The apex courtroom was listening to plea searching for extra intensive verification of EVMs knowledge towards VVPAT information.
NGO ADR in its plea sought cross verification by the voters of votes forged by them as “counted as recorded” within the EVMs with VVPAT. The requirement of the voters verifying that their votes have been “recorded as cast” is considerably met when the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after urgent the button on the EVM by way of a clear window for the voters to confirm that their vote has been recorded on the internally printed VVPAT slip earlier than the slip falls into the ‘poll field’, the plea said.
It stated that nevertheless, there’s a full vacuum in regulation because the ballot panel has supplied no process for the voter to confirm that his or her vote has been ‘counted as recorded’ which is an indispensable a part of voter verifiability.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DNA employees and is printed from ANI)
