At the moment, only votes in five randomly selected EVMs in each assembly segment are tallied against the VVPAT slips.

he Supreme Court on Monday (April 1) issued notice to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on a plea seeking the counting of all Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips in the upcoming elections, to ensure that Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are correctly registering votes.

At the moment, only votes in five randomly selected EVMs in each assembly segment are tallied against the VVPAT slips.

According to LiveLaw, a bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and Sandeep Mehta issued notice and clubbed the petition with a plea filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms on the same matter. The new plea was filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal.

The petition also challenges the ECI’s rule that VVPAT verification should be done sequentially rather than simultaneously, creating delays. If it were done simultaneously, and more officers are deployed, complete verification could be done in 5-6 hours.

Amidst the numerous concerns raised by experts regarding VVPATs and EVMs coupled with the significant number of reported discrepancies between EVM and VVPAT vote counts in the past, it is essential that all VVPAT slips be meticulously counted, the petitioner argued according to Bar and Bench.

Earlier this year, the court had refused to grant ADR urgent hearing on its 2021 petition.