On Tuesday, the Supreme Court sought a response from the Election Commission of India (ECI) regarding a petition that calls for the establishment of a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to ensure compliance with the Court's 2024 directions on verifying Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) data.
In a ruling last year, the Court had permitted candidates who secured second or third place in election results to request verification of the burnt memory/microcontroller in five percent of EVMs within each assembly constituency or an assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency. This verification would be carried out by engineers from the EVM manufacturers.
The division bench, comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta, during Tuesday’s hearing, emphasized that the verification process must not result in the deletion of original poll data.
"We will keep this after 15 days. Please file your response by then. Please do not erase the data and reload the data. Let someone just examine," the Court told the ECI.
The order was passed in response to a petition filed by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), represented by advocate Prashant Bhushan. A separate petition filed by Haryana Congress candidate Sarv Mitter was also scheduled for hearing.
Senior Advocate Devadutt Kamat, who represented Mitter, informed the Court that the verification process was currently permitted only on dummy units. He further pointed out that even in such cases, the cost of verifying each machine amounted to ₹40,000 for the candidate.
"I appear for Sarv Mitter. The entire data was wiped out. the EVMs on which polling was done should be tested," he said
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