SC to EC: Why no VVPAT test in more booths?

New Delhi: Disapproving of the Election Commission’s firm stand that it can’t increase the number of constituencies for physical verification of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), the Supreme Court on Monday asked the commission to give reasons on why it was not willing to have VVPAT tested in more than one polling station per Assembly segment.

A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Deepak Gupta asked the commission to file an affidavit on this by 4 pm on Thursday. The bench passed this order in a petition filed by Andhra Pradesh CM N. Chandrababu Naidu and 20 other political leaders who demanded that physical verification of VVPAT must be done for at least 50 per cent of polling stations.

In response to the court’s direction on March 15, deputy election commissioner Sudip Jain was present in court. When the CJI asked Mr Jain “Will you (EC) be able to increase it? We would like you to increase it”, Mr Jain said it was not necessary to increase it, and it was “not required”.

The CJI told Mr Jain: “If you were so confident, why did you not introduce the VVPAT system on your own? Why did not need a court order? Do you know how much opposition the court faced during the hearing on the introduction of VVPAT? No institution, including the judiciary, should insulate itself from suggestions and improvements.”

Indicating to senior counsel Aryama Sundaram, who appeared for the commission, that the court wanted to increase the VVPAT verification to more polling stations, the bench directed the Election Commission to file an affidavit setting out reasons why the physical verification of the VVPAT paper trail should not be extended to more than one polling station per Assembly segment. The affidavit has to be filed by 4 pm on Thursday. The matter will now be heard on April 1.

Besides Mr Chandrababu Naidu, the others who filed the petition include Sharad Pawar, K.C. Venugopal, Derek O’Brien, Sharad Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav, Satish Chandra Mishra, M.K. Stalin, T.K. Rangarajan and Arvind Kejriwal. They submitted that parties (six of the seven national parties and 15 regional parties) across the country, electorally representing about 70-75 per cent of the people of India, were filing the petition for a direction to quash the guideline of the Election Commission which provides that VVPAT shall be conducted only for one randomly selected polling station of a constituency.

They sought a further direction to the EC for random verification of at least 50 per cent of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) using VVPAT per Assembly segment. The petitioners submitted that the Supreme Court had held that VVPAT is “an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections”. However, the EC guideline being currently followed for conducting VVPAT defeats the entire purpose of introducing VVPAT and makes it merely ornamental, with no actual substance, they said.

The petitioners said they sought to espouse the cause of safeguarding the basic structure of the Constitution by way of ensuring free and fair elections so that citizens’ fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution were not denied. They said EVM collection and counting have not been free from suspicion and various incidents have occurred which leads to mistrust in the minds of the public on the overall conduct of the counting/election process.