Supreme Court rejects Opposition review plea to up VVPAT verification by 25%

A last ditch attempt by 21 Opposition parties to get counting of five EVMs per assembly segment rule increased to at least 25% got a thumbs down from the Supreme Court. The Court lost no more than five minutes to dismiss the review petition filed by 21 Opposition leaders led by Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu.

Naidu was present in Court to witness the proceeding along with former Union Minister Farooq Abdullah and CPI leader D Raja. Appearing for the Opposition, senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi pointed out that on April 8, 2019, the petition by the very same petitioners led the Court to increase the counting of voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips from one polling station per assembly segment to five polling stations.

Singhvi claimed that the thought behind the order was to increase confidence building in the machines and satisfy the political parties, representing citizens, about free and fair polls. This exercise required manual counting of slips from five EVMs per assembly segment.

This amounted to just 2% of EVMs used in the election, which Singhvi felt was not adequate to ensure confidence among voters.

Although the petition demanded this rule to be extended to 50% EVMs, Singhvi made a last minute proposal, bringing down the demanded percentage to 25%. He said the election results would only be delayed by two to three hours.

The bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna was not convinced and dismissed the petition. Ending the proceeding within five minutes, the bench said, "We are not inclined to modify our earlier order of April 8."

Singhvi tried to make a last minute intervention to steal some further relief. He found help from his counterpart and senior lawyer Kapil Sibal who joined the argument for hearing them out.

The bench pointed out that what was under consideration was a review petition. Unlike the rule which requires a review petition to be decided in chambers, the Court reminded both Sibal and Singhvi, "This is an open court hearing. We are not obliged to hear you. How many counsels do we hear on the same issue?"

When the 21 parties had approached the Court in the first round with a similar demand for counting of VVPAT slips of 50 per cent EVMs, the EC dismissed it upfront claiming that it required trained manpower, designated cabins at counting centres, besides pushing the schedule of announcement of results for each round of counting.