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New Delhi, April 25 (Hindustan Reporter) The Supreme Court will give its verdict tomorrow i.e. on 26th April on the issue of 100% matching of EVMs with VVPAT. In the petitions filed in the court, it has been demanded that the votes cast through EVMs should be 100 percent matched with the VVPAT slips or the elections should be conducted through ballot paper. The Election Commission has called this demand impractical.
On April 24, the Supreme Court had sought clarification from the Election Commission on the functioning of EVMs, after which the decision was reserved. The Election Commission had told the Supreme Court that the micro controller is present in all three (control unit, button unit and VVPAT). Everything can be programmed just once. Cannot influence the controller from outside.
The Election Commission had said that the data is kept safe for 45 days. On the question of symbol loading, the Election Commission had said that the Election Commission and Bharat Electronics are the only two manufacturers for symbol loading. Then Justice Sanjiv Khanna had asked whether you can get more symbol loading units from more manufacturers. Then the Election Commission had said that it would not take much time for the availability of the goods but it would take a month to make these machines.
On the court's clarification on sealing of EVMs, the Election Commission had said that when the control unit stores the voting data, it is sealed. The VVPAT is also sealed and after that signatures are taken from all the polling agents. During the hearing, lawyer Prashant Bhushan had said that every microcontroller has a flash memory. It would not be correct to say that no other program can be fed in flash memory. Then Justice Sanjeev Khanna had said that the Election Commission told us that no other program can be fed in the flash memory. He says that he does not upload any program in the flash memory, but uploads the election symbol, which is in the form of an image. When we have asked all these questions to the Election Commission, then we will have to trust the Commission for technical things. Then Prashant Bhushan had said that he too can upload any wrong program along with the election symbol. I have a suspicion about that. On this the court had said that we understood your argument. We will take this into account in our decision.
Justice Dipankar Dutta had asked Prashant Bhushan whether we can issue any order on the basis of doubt. The report you are relying on states that no incident of hacking has taken place so far. We do not control any other constitutional authority. We cannot control elections.