-Supreme Court said, reserved its decision in VVPAT case

-Said, how can we give decision on the basis of doubt?

New Delhi. The Supreme Court on Wednesday reserved its verdict on the demand for 100% cross-checking of Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) votes and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.

During the hearing of the case, the court said that we cannot issue orders on the basis of doubt. The court is not the controlling authority of elections. We do not control any other constitutional authority. We cannot control elections.

Justice Sanjeev Khanna said that we are not hearing the merits again. We want some definite clarification. We had some questions and we got answers. Reserving the decision. The hearing in this case lasted for 40 minutes today.

Actually, Advocates Prashant Bhushan, Gopal Shankaranarayan and Sanjay Hegde are appearing on behalf of the petitioners in this case. Prashant is from Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR). At the same time, till now Advocate Maninder Singh has been present on behalf of the Election Commission, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta has been present on behalf of the officers and Central Government.

Can voters be given VVPAT slips?

Earlier on April 18, the bench of Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Justice Dipankar Dutta had reserved the decision after listening to the arguments of the lawyers and the Election Commission for 5 hours. In the last hearing, the court had asked the Election Commission whether the VVPAT slip cannot be given to the voters after voting.

On this, the Election Commission said – There is a huge risk in giving VVPAT slips to voters. This will compromise the secrecy of the vote and could be misused outside the booth. We cannot say how other people can use it.

Regarding VVPAT, the court said that till now not a single report of irregularities has come to light. We are also seeing whether an order for matching of more VVPATs can be given.

How do we issue orders based on suspicion

During the hearing, Justice Dipankar Dutta asked Prashant Bhushan that can we issue any order on the basis of doubt? The report you are relying on states that no incident of hacking has taken place so far.

VVPAT was mentioned in the Supreme Court decision and it was followed, but where does it say that all the slips should be matched. It is written 5 percent, now let's see if apart from these 5 percent any candidate says that there have been cases of misuse.

intervened twice

The court further said that if some improvements are needed then they will be made. We intervened in this matter twice. First by making VVPAT mandatory and then by issuing orders for matching one to five VVPATs.

During the hearing, Justice Sanjeev Khanna said that that is why we had asked the same question to the Election Commission. The Commission says that no other program can be fed in the flash memory. He says that he does not upload any program in the flash memory, but uploads the election symbol, which is in the form of an image. We will have to trust the Commission on technical matters.

On this, Prashant Bhushan argued that he can upload any wrong program along with the election symbol. I have a suspicion about that. Then the court said that we understood your argument. We will take this into account in our decision.

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