New Delhi: Amid the reports of possibilities of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) being hacked, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has assured the Supreme Court that EVMs can neither be hacked nor tampered with.
In response to a petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which sought a direction to cross-verify the vote count in EVMs with votes “recorded as cast” in the VVPAT, the ECI has said that EVMs are “totally standalone machines having one-time programmable chips”.
In an affidavit spanning over 450 pages, the EC has put in place “stringent technical and administrative safeguards for EVMs so that the machines cannot be tampered or manipulated to any extent whatsoever.
The assurance by the poll panel has come ahead of crucial Assembly elections in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizorum. The assembly elections in five states are due in November.
Moreover, the poll body has also ruled out the need to “re-design voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). “The existing VVPAT enables electors to check whether their votes have gone to the candidate of their choice. Further there is a provision for mandatory verification of printed VVPAT
slips from five randomly selected
polling stations of each Assembly constituency/segment, which is the audit of the electronic vote before the results,” the EC has said in its affidavit to the apex court.
The EC further said that counting of 100 percent VVPAT slips would pose a “great difficulty”.
“For one, the chemically-coated slips are a “little sticky” and it would take an hour to count the slips from one VVPAT alone. Since the introduction of VVPATs, 118 crore voters have cast their votes with full satisfaction. Only 25 complaints were received, and all were found false, the EC said.
On the issue of counting the slips individually, the ECI said that manual counting of paper slips would be prone to human error, mischief, drudgery, and mischievous false narratives on social media.
“Moreover, there is no fundamental right of the voter to verify through VVPATs that their votes were ‘recorded as cast’ and ‘counted as recorded’,” the EC affidavit said.
While appearing for the ADR before the top court, advocate Prashant Bhushan pointed out that Assembly elections for some states are due in November. Bhushan urged the court to hear the matter after two weeks, which was declined by Justice Sanjiv Khanna-led bench. However, the court listed the case for consideration in November.