Key Points
The Supreme Court's decision to hear a plea seeking complete count of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail paper slips in the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls has brought back the focus on the Election Commission of India's rationale in limiting the verification to five randomly selected EVMs...
The poll panel has defended its rationale in courts and also found support from experts such as the Indian Statistical Institute which said the random formula was statistically sound..
After a petition by over 20 political parties in 2019, SC mandated physical verification of EVM-VVPAT counts in 2% polling booths per constituency...
Of the 20,687 polling stations where the mandatory physical verification of VVPAT slips was conducted on SC orders in 2019, eight cases of mismatch were found, which EC said were mainly due to 'easily explainable human errors'..
EC then consulted experts from the Indian Statistical Institute, IIT Kanpur and the Chennai Mathematical Institute, among others, to devise a 'scientific formula' to arrive at the right percentage and sample of VVPAT slips that should be counted to verify the electronic result..
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