NGOs allege destruction of VVPAT data of 2019 LS polls

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 24

The Supreme Court on Monday deferred hearing on a PIL alleging that the Election Commission violated election rules by destroying the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) data of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls before the conclusion of the statutory one-year period.

Citing information received through an RTI application from the EC, petitioners Association for Democratic Reforms and Common Cause submitted that the Conduct of Election Rules required the VVPAT data to be preserved for a year.

“We do not look into it at the moment,” a Bench headed by Chief Justice SA Bobde said after petitioners’ counsel Prashant Bhushan termed it a “shocking fact”.

The Bench has already issued notice to the EC on the PIL that demanded a probe into alleged discrepancies between the voter turnout figure and the number of votes counted in 347 constituencies in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The EC has not filed its response.

The matter is likely to be taken up for hearing after four weeks.

Citing the research data of a team of its experts, the ADR said there were serious discrepancies between the number of voters in different constituencies, that is the voter turnout data collated and provided by the EC and the number of votes counted.

It claimed that the findings of the research revealed several discrepancies, including those in the master summary of 542 constituencies.

The ADR said the discrepancies ranged from one vote to 1,01,323 votes, which was equal to 10.49 per cent of the total votes. The plea further said there were six seats where the discrepancy in the number of votes was higher than the winning margin.

The petition has sought accurate reconciliation of data before declaration of poll results and a direction to the Election Commission to bring in public domain the information in the statutory forms — 17C, 20, 21C, 21D and 21E — for last year’s Lok Sabha polls and all future elections.

The petitioners said to uphold and preserve the sanctity of elections, it was imperative that election results were accurate and the discrepancies in the parliamentary polls could not be set aside without a satisfactory resolution.