SC bench of CJI Sanjiv Khanna to hear plea seeking verification of EVMs
New Delhi: A Supreme Court bench, set to be led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna, will hear a critical plea challenging the current Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) verification process in elections.
Former Haryana minister and five-time MLA Karan Singh Dalal, along with co-petitioner Lakhan Kumar Singla, has approached the apex court seeking a comprehensive policy for EVM verification. During Friday’s hearing, Justices Dipankar Datta and Manmohan directed that the case be placed before the Chief Justice’s bench alongside similar pending petitions.
The petition stems from an earlier Supreme Court judgement in the ‘Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India’ case, which mandated verification of five per cent of EVMs per Assembly constituency after election results were announced. Despite this directive, the petitioners argue that the Election Commission (EC) has failed to establish a clear verification protocol.
Dalal and Singla, who secured the second-highest votes in their respective constituencies, are challenging the current Standard Operating Procedure (SoP). They contend that the existing process involves only basic diagnostic tests and mock polls, without a thorough examination of potential tampering.
The petition highlights significant limitations in the current verification mechanism. Manufacturers from Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) are currently restricted to counting Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips during mock polls, preventing a comprehensive integrity check of the voting machines.
Crucially, the petitioners emphasise that their plea does not challenge the election results themselves. Instead, they seek a robust verification mechanism focusing on examining the original “burnt memory” or microcontroller of four EVM components: the Control Unit, Ballot Unit, VVPAT, and Symbol Loading Unit.
The petition requests the Supreme Court to direct the Election Commission to conduct the verification exercise within eight weeks. Separate election petitions challenging the results are already pending before the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
This legal challenge comes in the wake of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s significant victory in the recent Haryana Assembly elections, where the party secured 48 out of 90 seats.
