Human errors are possible in the Electronic Voting Machine-Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (EVM-VVPAT) system of polling, the Supreme Court acknowledged in a judgment on April 26.
A Bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta said the sole instance of discrepancy it could find in the EVM-VVPAT system occurred as close as in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
A mismatch was found while verifying the votes actually cast and the VVPAT paper slips churned out at polling station no. 63, Mydukur Assembly constituency in Andhra Pradesh.
“On verification, it was found that the discrepancy had arisen on account of failure of the presiding officer to delete the mock poll data,” Justice Khanna said.
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Though the court said it was “not possible to rule out human errors”, it was consoled by the fact that “the manual on EVM and VVPATs deals with such situations and lays down the protocol which is to be followed”.
Random verification
The judgment reeled out statistics provided by the Election Commission on the efficacy of the EVM-VVPAT system, including that the top poll body had so far conducted random VVPAT verification of five polling booths per Assembly segment/constituency for 41,629 EVMs-VVPATs.
“Over four crore VVPAT slips were tallied with the electronic counts of their control units. Not even a single case of mismatch [except the one in Mydukur Assembly constituency] or wrong recording of votes were detected,” Justice Khanna noted.
The Bench said Returning Officers have allowed VVPAT slip recounting in 100 cases since 2017.
“The VVPAT slip count had matched with the electronic count recorded in the control unit in all cases,” the court stated.
