The Supreme Court on April 18 reserved its verdict on a batch of public interest litigations seeking a direction to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to mandatorily cross-verify the votes cast in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips. Over a period of two days, the court heard various lawyers representing the petitioners, an official from the ECI and senior advocate Maninder Singh, who appeared for the ECI. It may be noted that on April 16, the top court dismissed the request of the petitioners to revert back to paper ballots and observed that it would not be practical for a country the size of India to return to paper ballots, considering the population sizes and other factors.
While we wait for the top court’s verdict, the reliability of VVPAT systems has been questioned for a while. Many critics have cited instances of malfunctioning printers, paper jams, and discrepancies between electronic and paper records. The question of tallying VVPAT slips rose when the opposition parties contended after the 2017 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh that the voting machines were tampered to favour the BJP. In March 2023, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) had filed a petition before the apex court saying that to ensure free and fair election the tally from EVMs should be cross-verified with the VVPATs. To make sure that this process is carried out as fast as possible, ADR suggested the use of barcodes on VVPAT slips.
VVPAT was introduced for the time in India in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. When a voter casts their vote using an EVM, the VVPAT system generates a paper slip containing the name and symbol of the candidate for whom the vote was cast. The paper slip can be viewed by the voter. This allows the individual to verify whether the vote was cast correctly on the EVM. On April 8, 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the ECI to increase the VVPAT slips from one EVM per Assembly constituency to five. It had issued guidelines for mandatory verification of VVPAT slips, out of five randomly selected polling stations, after completing the final round of counting votes recorded in EVMs.
The VVPAT has been a subject of multiple legal cases, starting with Subramanian Swamy vs Election Commission of India, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a paper trail was indispensable for free and fair elections, and ordered the government to provide funding for the roll-out of VVPATs. In 2019, Chandrababu Naidu moved the Supreme Court asking for a minimum 50 per cent randomised VVPAT slips to be counted. The Election Commission, however, argued that if this were to happen, results would be delayed by five to six days. Opposition parties on the other hand argue that the sanctity of a fair election outweighs the concern of delay in the declaration of results.
