Apex court to take up ex-minister’s plea on EVM verification today
The Supreme Court will on Friday take up a petition seeking a direction to the Election Commission to put in place a policy for verification of the original burnt memory/micro-controller of the four components of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in terms of the court’s April 26 verdict in Association for Democratic Reforms Case.
The units of EVMs are Control Unit, Ballot Unit, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and Symbol Loading Unit. The petition filed by former Haryana minister and five-time MLA Karan Singh Dalal and Lakhan Kumar Singla—a candidate in the recent Assembly poll—is listed before a Bench led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna.
A Bench led by Justice Vikram Nath had on December 13 said the matter should go to the Bench (of CJI) that rejected the demand for re-introduction of paper ballots.
A Bench led by Justice Khanna had dismissed PILs seeking return to the paper ballot system or a 100% cross-verification of votes cast through EVMs with VVPAT slips, even as it issued directions to the Election Commission to strengthen the current EVM system.
Giving the thumbs up to the EVM system, it had said, “EVMs offer significant advantages. They have effectively eliminated booth capturing by restricting the rate of vote casting to four votes per minute, thereby prolonging the time needed and thus check insertion of bogus votes.”
