The Election Commission of India informed the Supreme Court on Thursday that the manufacturer of the electronic voting machines does not know which button is going to be allotted to which political party or which machine is going to be allotted to which state or constituency.
Answering queries on the working of the machines and their VVPAT (voter-verified paper audit trail) units, a senior official of the commission also informed a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta that the voting unit comprises a ballot unit, control unit and a VVPAT unit, which is basically a printer.
Seven days before polls, images of symbols are uploaded on the 4 MB flash memory of the VVPAT machine in the presence of candidates or their representatives.
The official pointed out that the ballot unit is agnostic to the candidates or symbols. It only has buttons against which party symbols are pasted. When a button is pressed, the unit sends a message to the control unit, which alerts the VVPAT unit, which in turn prints the symbol matching the button that is pressed.
Meanwhile, Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner Association for Democratic Reforms, referred to a report in a Malayalam daily that during a mock poll in Kerala on Wednesday, four EVMs and VVPAT units recorded an extra vote against the BJP symbol. The court asked the commission to verify the claim.
Appraising the court about it in the post-lunch session, the commission said it had received a report from the authorities and that the claim was found to be “false”.
Join our whatsapp group for Latest updates