NEW DELHI: As the country voted in round two of Election 2024, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and said "blindly distrusting" any aspect of the system can breed unwarranted scepticism.
Weighing in on the intensely debated issue that has long divided parties, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta delivered two concurring verdicts and dismissed all the pleas in the matter, including those seeking to go back to ballot papers in elections. It also maintained that "democracy is all about striving to build harmony and trust between all institutions".
The Supreme Court’s long anticipated verdict quickly found echo in the politicalscape with Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying at a rally in Araria in Bihar that it was a “tight slap” on the Congress-led opposition which now must “apologise” for committing the “sin of creating distrust” against electronic voting machines.
