Ahmedabad: EVMs against Right to Privacy, claims engineer

A 53-year-old civil engineer has sent a letter and a petition to the Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and to the registry of the Supreme Court casting aspersions on the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines (EVMs) for counting of votes and demanding that Thursday's counting shall be conducted through voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT).

The man, Atul Patel, who is a Congress party worker from Ahmedabad, has claimed that the EVMs can generate data from its database which can show which serial number voter voted for which party and which candidate, which is a violation of the Right to Privacy. He has claimed that booth-wise counting of EVMs violate the privacy and secrecy of the voters and as a result, they face harassment, or are rewarded, in the future based on their voting pattern revealed by the EVMs.

Patel has clarified in his petition that since there is no time left, he cannot remain present in New Delhi to complete the formalities of the Supreme Court registry and therefore, he is sending the original petition to the CJI and its copies to other judges of the apex court through post and on email. He claimed that he had already complained to the Election Commission of India raising the issues mentioned in the petition, but he did not receive any reply from the poll