A Supreme Court bench, led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna, will hear a plea seeking a policy for verifying Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). The petition, filed by former Haryana minister Karan Singh Dalal, calls for clear rules to check EVM components. It also asks for compliance with an earlier court order on the matter. The case aims to ensure transparency in the use of EVMs.
New Delhi: A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna will consider a petition filed by former Haryana minister and five-time MLA Karan Singh Dalal, who is seeking a policy for the verification of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
During a hearing on Friday before Justices Dipankar Datta and Manmohan, the bench stated that the case would be forwarded to the Chief Justice alongside similar petitions.
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The judges remarked,
“This can go before the Chief Justice’s bench,”
Dalal’s petition calls for compliance with a previous Supreme Court ruling in the case of Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India.
Dalal, along with co-petitioner Lakhan Kumar Singla, who secured the second-highest votes in their constituencies, is requesting that the Election Commission (EC) establish a protocol for examining the original “burnt memory” or microcontroller of four EVM components; the Control Unit, Ballot Unit, VVPAT, and Symbol Loading Unit.
The Supreme Court’s earlier ruling mandated that five percent of EVMs in each assembly constituency should be verified by engineers from the EVM manufacturers after election results are announced.
The court specified that this verification process would occur upon a written request from candidates who received the second or third-highest votes. The petitioners claim that the Election Commission failed to create any such policy, resulting in an unclear procedure for burnt memory verification.
According to the petition, the current Standard Operating Procedure (SoP) issued by the Election Commission only includes basic diagnostic tests and mock polls, without assessing the burnt memory for potential tampering.
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The role of engineers from Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), the manufacturers of EVMs is reportedly limited to counting VVPAT slips during mock polls, which the petitioners argue undermines a thorough examination of the machines’ integrity.
Dalal and Singla emphasize that their petition does not challenge the election results but seeks a robust mechanism for EVM verification.
They noted that separate election petitions contesting the results are already pending in the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The petitioners have urged the Supreme Court to direct the Election Commission to conduct the verification process within eight weeks. In the recent Haryana elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 48 out of 90 assembly seats.
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