Supreme Court hears plea to tally EVM votes with VVPAT slips: LIVE UPDATES

The Supreme Court is hearing a petition seeking that every vote cast through an Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) is tallied with Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips during elections.

Presently, VVPAT verification is done only for votes recorded in five randomly selected EVMs in each assembly segment.

The petitioner, lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal, has prayed that each and every EVM vote should be tallied against VVPAT slips.

The petitioner has also sought a direction that voters should be allowed to physically drop the slips generated by the VVPAT in a ballot box to ensure that the voter’s ballot has been ‘counted as recorded’.

The Court had sought the Election Commission of India's (ECI) response in the matter on April 1, when the plea was tagged with other pending matters concerning EVM and VVPAT.

During the last hearing, the Court had asked the ECI whether there is any law providing for punishment of officials and authorities for manipulating EVMs.

At the time, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta had observed that unless there is fear of stringent punishment, there is always a possibility of manipulation taking place.

Live updates from the hearing today feature here.