The Supreme Court on Thursday sought responses from the Centre and the Election Commission of India on a plea filed by the Bahujan Samaj Party challenging the use of electronic voting machines without paper trail.
A bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar issued notices to the government and the ECI and asked them to respond to the plea by May 8, the next date of hearing.
During the hearing, senior advocate P Chidambaram, appearing for the BSP, told the bench that use of EVMs without voter-verifiable paper audit trail in the elections creates a serious doubt about the accuracy of voting and paper trail was required so that a voter can get a feedback of the vote cast by him.
He said that to assure accuracy in the voting process, paper trail is needed as there were chances of tampering with EVMs as there were reports that both the hardware and software of these machines are ‘vulnerable’.
“There is no way that a voter can verify as to whether the vote cast by him has gone to the right candidate. Without a paper trail, there is no way to verify it. In EVMs, a voter is only pressing the button and he does not know whether the machine is recording his voting correctly or not,” he said.
At the fag end of the hearing, senior advocate Kapil Sibal told the apex court that the Congress party also wants to intervene in the matter.
"Nowhere in the world, except in one country, these EVMs are being used,” Sibal said, adding, “Every technology can be hacked and that is our concern."
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Why EC hasn't issued formal statement on EVM hackathon: Kejriwal
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday questioned the Election Commission's ‘open challenge’ to political parties and experts to prove that EVMs can be manipulated.
Kejriwal wondered why the Commission was not coming out with any official statement and pushing the news of the reported challenge through ‘sources’ instead.
‘Why are these stories ascribed to ‘sources’? How credible are they? Why hasn’t EC issued any formal statement? Or is it just a plant? Has anyone actually seen any official statement from CEC? Am trying to get it since evening. Is this news correct?’ he said in a series of tweets.
On Wednesday, official sources of the EC claimed that the commission will invite political parties, experts, scientists and technocrats in the first week of May to try and hack the machines.
They said the challenge will be open for a week or 10 days and will have various levels.
