The Supreme Court on Tuesday, April 16, will hear a batch of petitions seeking cross-verification of the votes cast with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). The VVPAT is an independent vote verification system which enables an elector to see whether his vote was cast correctly.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta, which could not take up the pleas related to Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs, said it would consider all petitions in the matter for hearing on Tuesday.
On April 3, the Supreme Court had said it would hear the plea filed by NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) along with other matters, after advocate Prashant Bhushan sought an urgent hearing.
On April 1, the apex court had sought responses from the Election Commission of India and the central government on a plea by activist Arun Kumar Agrawal seeking a complete count of VVPAT slips in polls as opposed to the current practice of tallying slips from only five randomly selected EVMs from each assembly segment comprising a parliamentary constituency. The Supreme Court said both the petitions will now be taken up for hearing on Tuesday.
The petition has sought to match the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably “recorded as cast” and to ensure that the voter can verify through the VVPAT slip that his vote, as recorded on the paper slip, has been “counted as recorded”.
The petition has also said the requirement of the voters verifying that their votes have been “recorded as cast” is somewhat met when the VVPAT slip is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing the button on the EVM through a transparent window.
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