When a critic of EVMs went silent on Election Commission’s challenge

Supreme Court dismisses PIL seeking ballot papers over EVMs; AIADMK's legal battle against EVMs in 2001.

In the last week of November 2024, the Supreme Court dismissed a public interest litigation (PIL) petition, which sought re-introduction of ballot papers in place of EVMs. The court remarked that the machines were blamed only when a party lost an election. More than two decades ago, in Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK began a legal battle against the use of EVMs a few months before the State faced the 2001 Assembly election.

During November 1998, the Election Commission of India (ECI) introduced EVMs in 16 Assembly constituencies, spread over Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. In February 1999, the machines were used in the by-elections to seven Assembly constituencies in four States and Delhi. Four months later, the entire State of Goa was covered by the EVMs in the Assembly election. During September-October that year, 46 Lok Sabha constituencies (including South Chennai, Central Chennai, Madurai, and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu) saw the use of the machines for polling.

In February 2000, the machines were used in 45 out of the 90 constituencies in Haryana. Buoyed by the successful experiment, the ECI decided a year later to use EVMs in the entire Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, and Puducherry when the Assembly elections were due in the summer of that year, according to ECI documents.

It was then that AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa wrote to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) M.S. Gill. Arguing that electronic voting machines had failed even in the “scientifically and technologically advanced and developed countries”, she suggested that the machines be discarded in favour of ballot papers, said a news report of The Hindu published on February 8, 2001. A few weeks later, she moved the Madras High Court with a petition for prohibiting the CEC from using the EVMs for the Assembly election in Tamil Nadu. A perusal of the ECI’s literature on the history of EVMs and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) reveals that the AIADMK was the first political party to oppose the use of EVMs in a big way, first in the Madras High Court and then in the Supreme Court.

In her petition, the AIADMK leader had pointed out that even Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi and Defence Minister George Fernandes were against the use of EVMs when they were in the Opposition. She had referred to the row over the 2000 presidential election in the United States wherein the unreliability of computerised machines was “glaringly revealed”. She had also wanted the court to declare Section 61A of the Representation of the People Act, which facilitated the use of EVMs, as unconstitutional and one that was against the Act itself. The AIADMK’s allies — Pattali Makkal Katchi, Communist Party of India, Indian National League, and All-India Forward Bloc — were also petitioners in the case.

Exactly a month before the date of polling, the High Court, on April 10, rejected all the apprehensions raised by the petitioners about the efficacy of the machines and refused to go into the technical aspects. A Bench, comprising Chief Justice N.K. Jain and Justice K. Sampath, said that it was in agreement with the Election Commission’s contentions and found no ground to prohibit the use of the EVMs. Subsequently, the AIADMK approached the Supreme Court with a writ petition against the High Court’s ruling. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court threw out the petition, saying Articles 326 and 327 could not be so interpreted as to take away the jurisdiction of the ECI or abridge its powers under Article 324. It also clarified that its decision in A.C. Jose vs Sivan Pillai (1984) would not apply to the AIADMK’s case because in the former instance, it was by an executive order that the EVMs were sought to be used, a course of which was not permissible, being contrary to the Conduct of Election Rules. As Section 61A was inserted into the Act in 1989, the earlier decision could not be of any assistance to the petitioner.

However, the AIADMK-led alliance scored a massive victory in the Assembly election with a vote share of 49.8%, and the party secured a simple majority on its own, winning in 132 out of the 141 constituencies it had contested. Later, the party went silent on the issue. It raked up the matter three years later when it, along with the BJP, suffered a drubbing in the Lok Sabha election. In 2009, contrary to expectations in certain quarters, the AIADMK-led front bagged only 13 out of the 39 seats with a vote share of 37.66%. Again, the party urged the ECI to revert to ballot papers, arguing that EVMs were rigged in the election. When the ECI invited Jayalalithaa in September 2009 to visit the Commission or send a representative to demonstrate how the EVMs could be tampered with, no response was received from the AIADMK, the Union government informed the Rajya Sabha a few years later. In fact, Karunanidhi had publicly asked Jayalalithaa whey she had not rushed to New Delhi for demonstrating how the EVMs could be tampered with. Since then, the AIADMK has not complained about the EVMs, despite facing successive electoral setbacks since 2019.