Haryana EVM verification petition should go to Bench that gave verdict in April: SC

The Supreme Court on Friday said the petition seeking a policy for verification of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the recent Haryana polls should go to the Bench that rejected the demand for re-introduction of paper ballots.

“Why doesn’t this matter go before the same Bench?” a Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Punjab Varale told senior counsel Gopal Sankaranarayanan, who represented the petitioner.

As Sankaranarayanan said the April judgment was on petitions over EVMs, the Bench said, “That is what I am saying. It (plea) should go before the same Bench.”

While hearing a petition filed by former Haryana minister and five-time MLA Karan Singh Dalal and Lakhan Kumar Singla—a candidate in the recent Haryana Assembly poll seeking verification of EVMs used in the elections, Justice Nath directed that the matter to be placed before CJI Sanjiv Khanna for assigning to an appropriate Bench.

“To our understanding, the reliefs claimed by means of this petition under Article 32 of the Constitution of India would require interpretation/modification/implementation of the directions issued by this court vide judgement dated April 26, 2024 …” it said.

Dalal and Singla secured the second-highest votes in their respective constituencies and sought a direction to the Election Commission (EC) to implement a protocol for examining the original “burnt memory” or microcontroller of the four components of the EVM — the control unit, ballot unit, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and symbol loading unit.

The petitioners -- who have filed separate election petitions challenging the results before the Punjab and Haryana High Court—have urged the Supreme Court to direct the EC to conduct the verification exercise within eight weeks.

They sought compliance of the top court’s April 26 verdict in ‘Association for Democratic Reforms versus Union of India’.

The Supreme Court had on April 26 dismissed PILs seeking return to the paper ballot system or a 100 per cent cross-verification of votes cast through EVMs with VVPAT slips even as it issued certain directions to the EC to strengthen the current EVM system.

Giving thumbs up to the EVM system in the midst of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, a Bench led by Justice Sanjiv Khanna had said, “EVMs offer significant advantages. They have effectively eliminated booth capturing by restricting the rate of vote casting to 4 votes per minute, thereby prolonging the time needed and thus check insertion of bogus votes. EVMs have eliminated invalid votes, which were a major issue with paper ballots and had often sparked disputes during the counting process.

However, it had opened a window for the aggrieved unsuccessful candidates securing second and third places by allowing them to seek verification of microcontroller chips embedded in five per cent EVMs per Assembly constituency on a written request upon payment of a fee to the poll panel.

It had mandated that five per cent of the EVMs in every Assembly constituency should undergo verification by the engineers from EVM manufacturers after the election results were announced.

However, the petitioners alleged that the EC failed to issue any such policy, leaving the procedure for burnt memory verification unclear.