In an urgent hearing held at 6:30 PM on Friday evening, the Supreme Court sought a response from the Election Commission (EC) within a week regarding a plea by an NGO.
The plea requested a directive to upload polling station-wise voter turnout data on its website within 48 hours of the conclusion of polling for each phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
Earlier in the day, lawyer Prashant Bhushan urged that the plea be heard immediately. Consequently, the Supreme Court assembled in the evening after a function of the Supreme Court Bar Association to bid farewell to Justice AS Bopanna. Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud deemed the Election Commission’s request for time to respond to the plea as “fair.”
Vacation Bench
The bench stated that the Election Commission should be given a reasonable amount of time to respond and scheduled the matter for hearing before an appropriate bench during the summer vacation on May 24, a day before the sixth phase of the seven-phase Lok Sabha polls.
Association for Democratic Reforms
During the brief hearing, senior advocate Maninder Singh, representing the poll panel, argued that the NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) had made “absolutely false allegations” in the plea. He also mentioned that a recent judgment by another Supreme Court bench, headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna, had addressed similar issues. On April 26, the Justice Khanna-led bench rejected pleas to revive paper ballots and to implement 100 per cent cross-verification of votes cast on electronic voting machines with voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT).
Bhushan opposed this submission, asserting that the issue of voter turnout data was not part of the earlier petition. Earlier in the day, the Chief Justice asked the counsel for the Election Commission to take instructions and stated that the matter would be heard at the end of the board. Last week, the ADR filed an interim application in its 2019 PIL seeking directives for the poll panel to immediately upload “scanned legible copies of Form 17C Part-I (Account of Votes Recorded)” for all polling stations after the polls.
The NGO further sought the Election Commission to provide tabulated polling station-wise data in absolute figures of the number of votes polled as recorded in Form 17C Part-I after each phase of polling in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections, as well as constituency-wise figures of voter turnout in absolute numbers.
Democratic Process
The plea was filed to ensure that the democratic process is not undermined by electoral irregularities. The NGO highlighted that the voter turnout data for the first two phases of the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections, published by the ECI on April 30, was released 11 days after the first phase of polling on April 19, and four days after the second phase of polling on April 26.
Delays
According to the plea, the data published by the ECI on April 30 showed a sharp increase (by about 5-6 per cent) compared to the initial percentages announced by the ECI at 7 PM on the day of polling. The petition stated that the “inordinate” delay in releasing the final voter turnout data, coupled with the unusually high revision of over five per cent in the poll panel’s press note of April 30, 2024, has raised concerns and public suspicion regarding the accuracy of the data.
The non-release of the absolute number of votes polled, combined with the “unreasonable delay” in releasing the votes polled data, has led to apprehensions among the electorate about the sharp increase between the initial data and the data released on April 30. The petition argued that these apprehensions must be addressed to maintain voter confidence. Therefore, it is necessary for the ECI to be directed to disclose on its website scanned legible copies of Form 17C Part-I (Account of Votes Recorded) for all polling stations, containing the authenticated figures for votes polled, within 48 hours of the close of polling.
