THE Supreme Court on Friday said the plea seeking a policy for verification of electronic voting machines will be heard by a bench headed by Justice Dipankar Datta in January next year. A bench comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar said the fresh plea of former Haryana Minister and five-time MLA Karan Singh Dalal and one Lakhan Kumar Singla on the issue will be heard by a bench headed by Justice Datta in the week commencing January 20, 2025. A bench comprising Justice Khanna and Justice Datta had delivered a verdict earlier in April rejecting the demand for bringing back the old paper ballots. At outset, senior advocate Maninder Singh, appearing for the Election Commission, sought dismissal of the plea, saying that similar petitions for same reliefs were rejected earlier.

 

The CJI said the bench headed by Justice Datta would hear this now. Earlier on December 13, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and P B Varale had refused to hear the plea, saying let it be heard by a bench which had heard similar petitions. Now, it was listed before the CJI-led bench. In its verdict on April 26, the apex court termed the suspicion of manipulation of the EVMs “unfounded” and said the polling devices were “secured” and eliminated booth capturing and bogus voting. The top court, however, opened a window for the aggrieved unsuccessful candidates securing the second and third places in poll results while allowing them to seek verification of microcontroller chips embedded in five per cent EVMs per assembly constituency on a written request upon payment of a fee to the poll panel. The fresh petition of Dalal and Singla has sought compliance of the top court’s April 26 judgement delivered in the case of ‘Association for Democratic Reforms versus Union of India’. Dalal and Singla secured the second-highest votes in their respective constituencies and sought a direction to the Election Commission (EC) to implement a protocol for examining the original “burnt memory” or microcontroller of the four components of the EVM -- the control unit, ballot unit, VVPAT and symbol loading unit.

 

The top court had mandated that five per cent of the EVMs in every assembly constituency should undergo verification by the engineers from EVM manufacturers after the election results were announced. The petitioners said the poll panel has failed to issue any such policy, leaving the procedure for burnt memory verification unclear. According to the petition, the current standard operating procedure issued by the EC only involves basic diagnostic tests and mock polls without scrutinising the burnt memory for tampering. The petitioners said that their plea did not challenge the election results but sought a robust mechanism for EVM verification. Separate election petitions challenging the results are pending before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The petitioners have urged the Supreme Court to direct the EC to conduct the verification exercise within eight weeks. The BJP won 48 out of 90 assembly seats in the recently held elections in Haryana.