SC notice to Centre, EC on EVMs

The Supreme Court asked the central government and the Election Commission on Thursday to respond to petitions asking for paper trails on all electronic voting machines (EVM) amid mounting controversy over the devices that transformed polling in India.

The court was hearing petitions filed by the Bahujan Samaj Party that has alleged large-scale tampering of EVMs aided the BJP in its sweeping victory in Uttar Pradesh last month.

“The views of technicians working in this field are important and any of what political parties say,” the court said. “The EVM is a remedy for a lot of ills.”

The row over EVMs was back in the headlines after allegations in Madhya Pradesh’s Ater – where the BJP is fighting the Congress in an assembly by-election — that a device registered votes only for the saffron party during a media demonstration.

The government and the EC has dismissed the charges and the poll panel has even challenged anyone to hack a device, after Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said he needed 72 hours to prove EVMs could be tampered with

EVMs were introduced in India more than a decade ago as a low-cost answer to charges of booth capturing and irregularities in paper ballots. The machines cut down counting time to just a few hours, made logistics easier and more user friendly. But in recent months, concerns have been raised about possible breaches in its software and security mechanism.

During the hearing, senior advocate P Chidambaram, appearing for the BSP, told the bench that use of EVMs without voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) in the elections creates a serious doubt about the accu- racy of the voting process and paper trail was required so that a voter can get a feedback of the vote cast by him.

He said that to assure accuracy in the voting process, paper trail is needed as there were chances of tampering with EVMs as there were reports that both the hardware and software of these machines are “vulnerable”.

“There is no way that a voter can verify as to whether the vote cast by him has gone to the right candidate. Without a paper trail, there is no way to verify it. In EVMs, a voter is only pressing the button and he does not know whether the machine is recording his voting correctly or not,” he said.

The matter has been posted for May 8.

P CHIDAMBARAM, APPEARING FOR THE BSP, TOLD THE BENCH THAT USE OF EVMS WITHOUT VVPAT TRAIL CREATES DOUBT ON THE ACCURACY OF VOTING

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