Election Commission of India today gave an assurance to the Supreme Court that it would not delete the data of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in case a candidate seeks verification of vote count/ poll results..The Bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta further outlined the process to be followed while verifying the EVMs and during the conduct of mock polls. .Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the Association for Democratic Reforms (petitioner) had urged that a Standard Operating Procedure be framed by the ECI for verification of the EVMs since the same was not in accordance with the earlier top court judgement of 2024 in the EVM-VVPAT case..The Bench today noted that ECI has filed an affidavit stating that they will no longer erase the data on the EVM units with respect to which the candidate seeks verification and that ECI proposes to amend the technical SOP.The top court accepted the said submission and stated that verification will have to be done by the engineers of Bharat Electrical Limited and Electronics Corporation of India Limited. The engineers will also issue certificates that they are satisfied that microcontroller and software loaded has not been tampered with and the integrity of the machine is intact..The Bench further directed that, "in case any candidate wants to conduct mock polls, he may make a request for erasure of data in the EVMs which will be after downloading the data stored. The download shall be certified by the engineers. Thereafter data of mock polls can be downloaded and again verified by the BEL and ECIL.".The Court had last year said that candidates, who come 2nd or 3rd in the election results, can request for verification of the burnt memory/microcontroller in five percent of the EVMs per assembly constituency or an assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency by engineers of the EVM manufacturers..[Read Live Coverage]
