"We Know What Happened...": Supreme Court Flags Ballot Voting Drawbacks
NDTV
Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayan, appearing for one of the petitioners, said, "We are not saying that there is any malice. Only issue is that of the confidence of the voter in the vote he has cast."
Hearing petitions seeking cross-verification of votes cast on Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) with papers slips generated through the VVPAT system, the Supreme Court today pointed to problems with the secret ballot voting method.
"We are in our 60s. We all know what happened when there were ballot papers, you may have, but we have not forgotten," Justice Sanjiv Khanna told Prashant Bhushan, counsel for one of the petitioners, Association for Democratic Reforms. Mr Bhushan was arguing how most European countries that had opted for voting through EVMs have returned to the paper ballots.
"We can go back to paper ballots. Another option is to give VVPAT slip to the voters in hand. Otherwise, the slips falls into the machine and the slip can be then given to the voter and it can be put into the ballot box. Then the VVPAT design was changed, it had to be transparent glass, but it was changed to dark opaque mirror glass where it is only visible when the light is on for 7 seconds," he said.
