IANS | 18 Apr, 2024
The Supreme Court on Thursday orally asked the Election Commission
(EC) to look into media reports suggesting that Electronic Voting
Machines (EVMs) erroneously registered votes in favour of the BJP during
mock polling in Kerala’s Kasaragod.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv
Khanna and Dipankar Datta asked senior advocate Maninder Singh,
representing EC, to look into the issue raised by advocate Prashant
Bhushan.
Amid the ongoing hearing on pleas seeking directions to
the poll body to tally every vote cast through EVMs with
Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips, Bhushan drew the
attention of the apex court towards a news article published on Tuesday
where agents of Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the United Democratic
Front (UDF) candidates in Kerala alleged that BJP's lotus was getting
extra votes during the commissioning of the machines for the polling.
At this, Justice Khanna told ECI’s counsel: “Mr. (Maninder) Singh, please check this up.”
The
top court is hearing the public interest litigations (PILs) seeking a
direction to the EC to mandatorily cross-verify the votes cast in EVMs
with VVPAT as opposed to the current practice of counting VVPAT slips of
five randomly selected polling stations in each assembly constituency.
