On Tuesday, the Supreme Court reportedly refused an urgent hearing to a petition by Rakesh Kumar, an activist from Uttar Pradesh, seeking a direction to the Election Commission of India (ECI) for mandatory verification of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips at more than five polling stations in every constituency ahead of the counting of votes in assembly elections to five states.
The petition was mentioned before a bench headed by Chief Justice of India N V Ramana “for urgent listing”. According to a report in Hindustan Times, senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for the petitioner, told the court, “Petition was seeking implementation of a 2019 Supreme Court judgement in the N Chandrababu Naidu v Union of India case, in which the court had directed the poll watchdog to ensure mandatory verification of VVPAT slips at five randomly selected polling stations.”
In its 2019 judgement, the SC had said, “The number of EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) that would now be subject to verification so far as VVPAT paper trail is concerned would be 5 per assembly constituency or assembly segment in a Parliamentary constituency…” The court allowed the petitioner to serve a copy of the plea to the commission and posted the matter for Wednesday. The bench also comprising justices AS Bopanna and Hima Kohli, on Tuesday said, “We will not interfere if the EC is following the judgement (of 2019).”
Appearing for the ECI, senior advocate Maninder Singh, informed the court that the poll overseer was following the April 2019 judgement, and the “ECI maintained no change can be made now as counting teams have been dispatched to the five states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur, where elections were held.” According to the petitioner’s lawyer, Raj Kumar, a new prayer was being prepared to increase the verification from five to 25 polling stations for better transparency, as “each polling station has more than one polling booth. They are conducting verification only in one booth.”
The bench said since it is a new prayer, it has to consider whether to issue notice and seek ECI’s response and “we need not hear tomorrow. We can consider it some other day.”
Meanwhile Kumar urged the court that verification of VVPATs should be done during the first and second rounds of polling and not towards the end reported HT, to which the bench said it is expected that polling agents of each political party should stay till the end of counting as “there is a change in trends till the end. If an agent does not stay till the end, what can we do” adding, “whatever judgement is there, they (ECI) are following it. We need not interfere.”
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