Supreme Court seeks ECI's response on plea for EVM verification
What's the story
The Supreme Court has asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) to reply within 15 days to a plea seeking verification of electronic voting machines (EVMs).
The plea was filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) which wants procedures for checking and verifying the burnt memory of EVMs to be included in their Standard Operating Procedures.
Data preservation
SC advises ECI not to erase EVM data
During the hearing, Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta told the ECI, "Please do not erase the data and reload the data. Let someone just examine."
"This is not adversarial," said the Chief Justice. "If the losing candidate wants clarification, the engineer can give clarification that there has been no tampering," Justice Khanna added.
EVM scrutiny
ADR advocates for thorough examination of EVMs
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the ADR, emphasized the need to check both the software and hardware of EVMs to identify any possible manipulation.
He said, "What we want is that somebody should examine the software and the hardware of the EVMs in order to see if...[it] has any element of manipulation or not."
During the hearing, Chief Justice Khanna also asked if paper trails are preserved after counting votes.
Paper trail
SC inquires about preservation of paper trails
To this, Bhushan replied that both EVMs and paper trails are supposed to be preserved.
The bench also told ECI's counsel, Senior Advocate Maninder Singh, that the ECI's fixed cost of ₹40,000 for EVM verification was too excessive.
"Reduce the cost of 40,000- that's too high," CJI told Singh.
The next hearing will take place in the week beginning March 3.