Apex court issues notice to poll panel, Centre on EVMs

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notices to the Election Commission and the Centre to respond at the next hearing on May 8 on a petition by the Bahujan Samaj Party, alleging manipulation of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to help the Bhartiya Janata Party win the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.

Three other opposition parties — Congress, Trinamul Congress and Samajwadi Party — also scampered to join the issue. The Bench of Justices J Chelameswar and S Abdul Nazeer allowed them to move their intervention applications.

The BSP petition alleges violation of the Supreme Court’s 2013 direction to deploy the voter verifiable paper trail (VVPAT) along with the EVMs.

It even sought quashing of the elections for all those seats in Uttar Pradesh that were held without the VVPAT. The Court issued notices after senior counsel P Chidambaram, appearing for the BSP, agreed to delete the prayer.

BSP supremo Mayawati had gone on record that the BJP lost wherever VVPAT was deployed and so she suspects the EVMs without the paper trail had been manipulated to benefit the BJP.

Senior counsel Kapil Sibal rushed to the Court towards the fag end of the hearing to plead for including the Congress as an intervener, stressing “every technology can be hacked and that is our concern.”

He told the court that except for one country in South America, nowhere in the world the EVMs are being used and that is the worry of the political parties that joined hands early this week to petition the Election Commission to revert back to ballot papers until it has sufficient VVPAT machines to cover all EVMs.

Chidambaram hinted at the suspicion that the ruling BJP did not want the VVPATs that would prevent any manipulation of the EVMS as he told the Court that the government had not released funds to the Election Commission to buy VVPATs despite its repeated reminders.

He told the Court that the EC even wrote directly to the Prime Minister, departing from the normal practice of communicating only with the law ministry, but still nothing happened. All that the EC required is Rs 3,000 crore to attach VVPATs to all five lakh and odd EVMs, he said.

Chidambaram said use of EVMs without VVPAT creates a serious doubt in the public mind about the accuracy of voting as a voter can get a feedback of the vote cast by him only if the paper trail is available.