New Delhi: A parliamentary panel has said that the Union government is yet to provide a reply for the last four years after it promised parliament that it would obtain information from the Election Commission about possible discrepancies between the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) tallies during the 2019 elections.
The Committee on Government Assurances tabled its report in Lok Sabha on Thursday regarding pending assurances pertaining to the Law and Justice Ministry. It referred to an unstarred question on whether any discrepancy between the EVM and VVPAT counts was found in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and if so, what corrective measures had been taken. The question was asked on June 26, 2019, and the government had back then said that information was being collected and would be laid on the table of the House.
However, four years have passed and no information of such kind has been forthcoming, the committee pointed out. It also added that identifying such issues is necessary for the security of the voting process.
The committee, headed by BJP MP Rajendra Agrawal, was told by the Law Ministry that it had asked the poll body for the required information on March 12, 2020, and had sent reminders on September 3, 2020, February 19, 2021, October 7, 2021, November 26, 2021 and June 3, 2022.
“The requisite information from the EC is still awaited,” the ministry said, according to the Indian Express.
A legislative department secretary in January this year had said that the EC had been called, but it could not attend as it was “having discussions with some political parties”. The committee then gave the ministry a month’s extension to fulfil the assurance.
“The Committee note that finding discrepancies between EVMs and VVPAT is a crucial aspect of ensuring the integrity and transparency of the electoral process. The Committee feels that the need for identifying such issues is all the more necessary to ensure the security and reliability of the voting process. EVMs and VVPATs are designed to provide an accurate reflection of voters’ choices…The Committee, however, regret to note that precious little has been done in this direction…The Committee is deeply concerned to note that the requisite information is still awaited from the Election Commission,” the report tabled by the committee in the parliament said.
The committee blamed the delay in obtaining requisite information on the “lack of coordination” between the law ministry and the poll body. The panel also instructed the legislative department to prioritise the matter to ensure that information from the EC is available without any further delay
For the first time in Indian electoral history, all EVMs were covered by VVPATs in the 2019 general elections. A VVPAT lets a voter see a paper slip printed in the VVPAT for a period of seven seconds, displaying the name and the symbol of the selected candidate. It then drops into a sealed drop box of the VVPAT. According to Supreme Court guidelines, the Election Commission verifies VVPAT slips in five randomly selected polling stations in each Assembly constituency.
The Association for Democratic Reforms has recently moved the Supreme Court, seeking directions to the poll body to cross-verify the count in EVMs with the VVPAT slips. “There is no way for any of the voters to verify that their vote has actually been ‘counted as recorded’ because there is no procedure provided for by the EC for them to match the VVPATs that they had certified as being ‘recorded as cast’ with what is actually counted,” the ADR petition argued.
The top court, in response to the ADR petition, issued directions to send a copy of the petition to the poll body and asked the poll panel to respond to the same.