CHENNAI: The Election Commission of India on Friday said that there is neither any technical basis nor the past experience of issues to question the reliability of the third generation M3 electronic voting machines (EVMs) which were introduced in a phased manner since 2013.
The submission was made by ECI’s counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan before the first bench of the Madras High Court, headed by Chief Justice SV Gangapurwala, on Friday when the writ petition filed by DMK’s organisation secretary RS Bharathi regarding the positioning of Verifiable Paper Audi Trail (VVPAT) between the balloting and control units of M3 EVMs came up for hearing.
Rajagopalan said, “If the petitioner party is raising an apprehension, there must be some technical basis or some past experience which shows manipulation has happened.”
He said there was neither any technical basis nor any experience to suggest manipulations.
He noted that M3 EVMs were first introduced in 2013 and several elections were conducted since then using these machines, he said, noting that the DMK had no complaints when the 2021 Assembly polls were held using these machines.
“The 2021 Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu were conducted by using the very same EVMs and the petitioner political party won the elections. They had no dispute in any of the constituency,” he said.
Pointing out to the court cases in the past relating to the EVMs, the counsel said they are flogging the same dead horse again and again. He said if the petition is entertained, it would send a ‘wrong message’ to the public and create doubts in their mind.
The court adjourned the hearing as DMK did not press for any orders regarding the issue for the ongoing polls. “The petitioner is not seeking any relief (orders) for ongoing elections, but it is for the future polls. We could consider the petition on a later date,” the bench said, while posting the petition to June 25, 2024.
Senior counsel NR Elango, representing the petitioner, told the court that the relief sought was not for the ongoing polls, but for every future election. He said the petitioner approached the court now because the guidelines were published by the ECI only in January this year.
He submitted that VVPAT is directly attached to the control units in the second generation EVMs but in the third generation machines, the VVPAT is sandwiched between the balloting unit and the control unit. The petitioner had stated that India being a democracy, a discrepancy of even one vote between the votes cast and votes counted is unacceptable and placing the VVPAT in between the balloting and control units would open up a myriad of technical possibilities to corrupt the integrity of the data fed to the Control Unit from the Balloting Unit.
Proper and transparent functioning of the EVMs is central to substantive fairness in the conduct of free and fair polls, which is a part of the basic structure of the Constitution, Bharathi said. He sought an order directing the ECI to not place the VVPAT between the balloting and control units.
