Twenty-one opposition parties filed a review petition with the Supreme Court on Wednesday, and sought that 50% of EVM’s be verified using voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips. The petitions will reportedly be heard by the apex court on Thursday. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court, based on the petition that had been filed, had directed the ECI to verify five VVPATs per constituency, against the opposition's demand for verifying 50% for every constituency.
The opposition leaders announced their renewed demand for verification at a press conference in Mumbai on Tuesday, the same day as the third phase of polling for the Lok Sabha elections. These leaders including TDP chief and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar, senior Congress leader and former Union Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) Sanjay Singh, DMK’s TKS Elangovan and CPI(M)’s Mahendra Singh.
“What we are demanding is something that can be done... it is easily achievable," Naidu said.
“EVMs can be manipulated, hacked and they even malfunction, besides being susceptible to programming error,” Naidu added.
No phase of polling has been without glitches so far, intensifying the demand for 50% verification.
Petitions have also been filed in the Telangana High Court by several Congress candidates who lost the Telangana Assembly polls, demanding that the VVPAT slips in their Assembly segments be recounted and that EVM votes and VVPAT slips be cross-verified.
The petition filed in the Telangana High Court states that the VVPAT slips and EVM votes didn’t tally. However, there shouldn’t be a difference as the VVPAT generates a printed slip each time a button is pressed in the EVM to confirm that the vote has gone to the voter’s choice of candidate or party.
Naidu earlier even kicked up a row with the Election Commission, who took offence to a man named Hari Prasad being a part of Naidu’s delegation. In 2010, he reportedly stole an EVM to demonstrate that it could be hacked.
Hari Prasad has claimed that EVM’s can be hacked, and has said that one loophole is the ability to ‘attack’ the display unit, which shows who the vote was cast for. The second is the ability to manipulate the memory and simply change the number of votes that each party polled per machine.
Former Chief Election Commissioner T S Krishnamurthy earlier termed the demands of the opposition parties to be unreasonable.
The opposition raised the demand after the first phase of the Lok Sabha polls.
“Names of lakhs of voters have been deleted online without physical verification. Parties have given long lists to the EC. It has become even more necessary to count at least 50 per cent of paper trail of VVPAT. We will demand the same in the Supreme Court,” Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi had then said.
With IANS inputs