Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Sep 22: The Supreme Court rejected a PIL on Friday that asked for an independent audit of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) source code and for the release of such results to the public.
“No actionable material that the poll panel acted in breach of the constitutional mandate” has been brought before the court by the petitioner, a bench consisting of the Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra stated.
In the end, the apex court stated that making the source code audit available to the public interferes with the policy issue, and we are not inclined to interfere in this policy issue.
“The Election Commission is entrusted with the control over elections. Presently, the petitioner places no actionable material before this court to show that the poll panel has acted in breach of its constitutional mandate. There is no material before us which casts doubt on EVMs,” the bench said.
Sunil Ahya, a lawyer in Mumbai, filed the petition, which demanded an impartial audit and the source code be locked afterward to prevent tampering.
Ahya argued before the top court in person as a party-in-person that the source code was the equivalent of the EVMs’ brain and needed to be inspected as a result.
He said that there was no formal audit report of the source code in the public domain and that the Election Commission of India was unable to give him the requested document despite his filing an RTI request. He approached the ECI three times, but to no avail.
“The source code is the brain behind the EVM, and it is about the survival of democracy,” he added.
Ahya requested the Supreme Court to order all respondents to immediately carry out an impartial software audit of various software products, especially the source of the EVMs and VVPATs. Ahya asserted in his appeal that the source code of EVMs and VVPATs is crucial to the election process.
