‘CANNOT DISCLOSE SOURCE CODE OF EVM, WILL BE MISUSED’, SAYS SUPREME COURT, SEEKS EC CLARIFICATION AHEAD OF ORDER ON VVPAT

The Supreme Court Wednesday said it needed more clarification over pleas seeking 100 per cent verification of votes made through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with their Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips, and sought the presence of Election Commission officials in the court at 2 pm today.

A bench comprising Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta is likely to pronounce its judgement on the batch of petitions today.

During the hearing, the bench remarked that the source code of the EVM "should never be disclosed" as "it will be misused". The source code refers to a set of instructions coded into the machine that tells it how to function.

In the last hearing on April 18, the Election Commission of India had answered the court's queries on EVMs and VVPATs, delving in to their functioning. The poll panel informed the court that the manufacturer of the EVMs does not know which button is going to be allotted to which political party or which machine is going to be allotted to which state or constituency.

On April 16, the bench had dismissed the petitioner’s idea of a return to the ballot papers, reminding that it had not forgotten what used to happen in the days when the ballot paper was used to cast votes.

The VVPAT machine is attached to the ballot unit of the EVM, and provides visual verification for the vote cast by a voter by printing a slip of paper with the voter’s choice on it. This is later used to verify votes cast in five randomly selected polling booths. The Opposition has been demanding that 100 per cent of VVPAT slips be cross-checked with the EVM votes.

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2024-04-24T06:44:03Z dg43tfdfdgfd