Indian SC rejects 50% VVPAT verification for EVMs
India's Supreme Court has rejected 50 per cent mandatory verification of electronic voting machines with Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail during Lok Sabha elections of May 23.
It was a demand of 21 opposition parties to increase the verification from 5 per cent to 50 per cent during vote counting in Lok Sabha, our New Delhi correspondent reports.
"We are not inclined to modify our order," said a bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi on the opposition parties' plea seeking a review of the top court's order.
In its April 8 order, the apex court had raised the VVPAT tallying from one booth per assembly segment to five earlier, ignoring Election Commission's reservations after the opposition's initial appeal.
The opposition parties pointed to EVM malfunctioning in recent phases of polling across the country to demand matching of at least 50% EVMs with VVPATs.
Appearing for the parties, senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress party told the court that they would be happy with tallying of 25-33% VVPATs with EVMs if 50% was not possible. The bench, however, rejected this demand too.
The petition cited instances of voters claiming that their votes went to a different party and not the one they had voted for in the first phase of parliamentary poll on April 11.
There is currently no mechanism on how to address such a discrepancy, the opposition parties said and wanted the EC to address the issue.
Hours after the Supreme Court rejected the opposition parties' demand, the parties moved the EC again to tally on its own the physical counting of VVPAT slips with five random EVMs.
The EC had earlier said a 50% tallying was not possible just ahead of counting because of the logistics involved and that it would delay counting by 5-6 days.
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