New Delhi
The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard the petitions demanding a policy regarding verification of EVMs. In the petition, the Election Commission has been asked to issue guidelines for investigation and verification of EVM’s memory/microcontroller. While hearing this, the court has sought an answer from the Election Commission (ECI) and ordered not to delete any data from EVMs nor to reload any data. In fact, a petition was filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) regarding the verification of EVMs in the court. A bench of Chief Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Justice Dipankar Dutta heard this.
The court said that we do not want EVM to be tampered with, we want the engineer to tell whether there is any tampering or not. Our problem is that we did not tell it correctly. On this, the Election Commission said that we will fulfill the way you want. The court ordered that they (ECIs) are trying to implement it. Who among you is right, we do not know. We are just trying to find out. The court has asked the Election Commission to file an answer on this issue in 15 days.
The court said that we are not willing to consider the petition of Karan Singh Dalal and MA 40/2025. We do not even want a detailed process. We want you to come and prove that it is being done. Do not erase or load the data again. You will just do that someone will come and certify.
The court said that if a losing candidate wants clarification, then the engineer can give clarification on it whether EVMs have been tampered with or not. We want that if someone has any doubt, they should be away. This is not protesting. Many times perceptions are different, we cannot tell what we want to tell. We do not want EVMs to be tampered with, we want engineering to tell whether there is any tampering or not. Who among you is right, we do not know. We are just trying to find out.
During the hearing, Advocate Prashant Bhushan, who appeared on behalf of ADR, said, “We want the process that the Election Commission has to adopt according to the Supreme Court’s decision, it should be in line with their standard operating protocol. We want a person to check for EVM software and hardware, so that it can be found out whether there is any kind of tampering in software and hardware.
After hearing the arguments of both the parties, the court clarified its earlier order, saying, “We did not want any disturbance till the counting of votes (through earlier orders) as well, we also wanted to see if anyone There is any doubt We did not want EVMs to be tampered with, we wanted engineering to tell if there was any tampering. “