The Supreme Court on Wednesday sought answers to some queries from the Election Commission of India while hearing a batch of petitions seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVM with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).
A bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta asked an Election Commission official regarding the functioning of the EVMs, including whether the microcontrollers installed in them are reprogrammable.
The court, among other issues, sought clarity from the ECI official on whether the microcontroller is installed in the control unit or the VVPAT and the flash memory of the microcontrollers in the EVMs cannot be reprogrammed.
The official response was: “All three units, the voting units, the VVPAT and the chip… all have their microcontrollers and these microcontrollers are housed in a secure unauthorized access detection module and cannot be accessed. All microcontrollers are one-time programmable. It burns when inserted, so it can never be changed. For symbol loading we have two manufacturers, one is ECI and Bharat Electronics.”
The top court said it would consider passing directions to strengthen the EVM system as going back to ballot papers was out of the question.
“Let us see what can be done if safeguards are needed and we will see what is needed to strengthen the current (EVM) system,” the court said.
In the morning, the court had said that it needed clarification on certain aspects, as there was some confusion over the answers given by ICE to the “frequently asked questions” (FAQs) about EVMs and the officials who should be present in court at 2 in the afternoon to clarify your queries.
The petitions sought cross-verification by voters of votes cast by them as being “counted as recorded” in the EVMs with VVPAT.
Currently, VVPAT receipts of five randomly selected EVMs in each Assembly segment are being verified.
The top court was hearing a petition seeking further verification of EVM data with VVPAT records.
The requirement for voters to verify that their votes have been “recorded as cast” is met to some extent when the VVPAT sheet is displayed for about seven seconds after pressing the EVM button through a transparent window for voters to verify that their vote has been recorded on the internally printed VVPAT slip before the slip falls into the “poll boxes”, the plea said.
He said that, however, there is a complete loophole in the law as the electoral panel has not provided any procedure for the voter to verify that his vote has been “counted as recorded”, which is an indispensable part of the verifiability of the votes. voters.
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