The Supreme Court on Tuesday listed for April 16 a batch of PILs seeking a direction to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to ensure a mandatory match of VVPAT slips with the votes cast in the EVMs.

Though the matter was supposed to be heard on April 16, on Tuesday it was listed before a bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta. As soon as the matter came up for hearing, Justice Khanna expressed surprise at how it got listed for Tuesday though it was indicated at the earlier hearing on April 3 that it would be heard on April 16 as top of the board matter.

On April 1, another bench headed by Justice B.R. Gavai sought responses from the Centre and the ECI on a PIL seeking “complete count” of VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) slips in elections as opposed to the current practice of verification of only five randomly selected EVMs (electronic voting machines) through VVPAT paper slips.

The bench, which included Justice Sandeep Mehta, had issued notice on a petition filed by lawyer and activist Arun Kumar Agrawal seeking such a direction because of apprehensions in certain quarters about the potential misuse and possibility of the EVMs being manipulated.

The PILs have challenged the EC’s guideline which mandates that VVPAT verification shall be done sequentially, i.e. one after the other, causing undue delay. The petitions contend that if simultaneous verification is done and a greater number of officers are deployed for counting in each Assembly constituency, then complete VVPAT verification can be done in five to six hours.

According to some of the petitioners, while the government has spent nearly Rs 5,000 crore to purchase 24 lakh VVPATs, at present, slips of approximately 20,000 VVPATs are only verified.

“Given that experts are raising questions regarding VVPATs and EVMs and the fact that a large number of discrepancies between EVM and VVPAT vote count have been reported in the past, it is imperative that all VVPAT slips are counted and the voter is allowed to verify that his vote, as cast in the ballot, is also counted by allowing him to physically drop his/her VVPAT slip in the ballot box,” the petitioner said.

In his petition, lawyer Agarwal has sought direction to the ECI to mandatorily cross-verify the count in EVMs with votes that have been verifiably “recorded as cast” by the voter through the VVPATs by counting all VVPAT slips.