'We all know what happened when there were ballot papers' Supreme Court junks plea of returning to ballot papers

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected the plea to return to the ballot paper era of voting. 

The top court instead questioned the petitioners who doubted the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) system of voting while stating the loopholes in the systems where votes are cast through ballot papers. 

A jury of justices, Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta, reflected upon these problems.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan noted that most European nations that used EVMs have switched back to paper ballots. 

In response, Justice Khanna stated, "We are in our sixties. We all remember what happened when there were ballot papers; you may have forgotten, but we have not," the Bar and Bench reported.

Bhushan further mentioned Germany's example of voting papers, to which Justice Dipankar inquired about Germany's population. Bhushan informed the court that Germany's population was roughly six crore, but India has 50-60 crore votes.

Justice Datta further dismissing the notion said that conducting elections in India is "a humongous task." 

He added, "It is impossible for any European country to conduct. Let us not draw similarities and comparisons with Germany and other nations. My own state, West Bengal, has a larger population than Mr Bhushan claimed for Germany. The state is quite tiny. We have to put our faith and confidence in someone. Obviously, they are accountable. But don't try to bring down the system in this manner," the Indian Express reported. 

These remarks came when the court was hearing a group of petitioned requesting a comprehensive count of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips during elections.

The petitioners argued that all VVPAT slips should be tallied with the EVMs rather than just five EVMs, as is now done.

The bench argued that human intervention through tallying in polls can lead to more problems and biases.

"Normally human interventions lead to problems and human weakness can be there which includes biases as well. Machine normally without human intervention will give you accurate results. Yes, the problem arises when there is human intervention or makes unauthorised changes when they are around the software or machine. If you have any suggestion to avert this, then you can give us that," the Court said.