On the heels of the second part of the polling, the Supreme Court will today pronounce the verdict on the batch of petitions seeking 100% verification of the votes recorded within the digital voting machines (EVMs) with the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trial (VVPAT) slips.
A two-judge bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta will pronounce the verdict today at 10:30 a.m. Significantly, the Court had earlier reserved its judgement on the petitions for April 18 after two days of listening to. However, it had once more listed the matter for dialogue on April 24 to perceive the workings of the EVMs with the ECI.
On Wednesday, in the course of the listening to, the bench sought solutions to sure technical queries linked to the functioning of EVMs, together with whether or not the microcontrollers fitted in them are reprogrammable.
Upon the courtroom’s itemizing of the queries, the ECI sought detailed clarifications. On the safety function, the ECI asserted that the EVMs can’t be tampered with in any circumstance and that the whole counting of the VVPAT slips was not virtually attainable.
Responding to a query on the reprogramming of the microcontroller, the ECI mentioned, “All the microcontrollers are one time programmable. They are burnt at the time of manufacturing. They cannot be changed.”
“All the three units, CU, BU, VVPAT, have their own microcontrollers. These microcontrolers are housed in it. They cannot be accessed physically. The one-time program is burnt into them, the ECI added.”
Meanwhile, Advocate Prashant Bhushan showing on the behalf of the one of many petioner. Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) (petioner), alleged the EC official’s assertion was not absolutely right. Bhushan backed his assertion whereas citing a report by a personal physique to again his rivalry.
“The report says that the kind of memory used in these three units can be reprogrammed. A malicious programme can easily be uploaded at the time of symbol loading,” Advocate Prashant Bhushan alleged. He added that efforts must be made to take away doubts concerning the transparency of EVMs.
It is pertinent to be aware that, as per the present observe, the ECI randomly verifies the VVPAT slips of EVMs from 5 polling cubicles per meeting section in a parliamentary constituency.
