The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked for the Standard Operating Procedure for EVMs post elections. This came over a petition that sought the protection of data of EVMs even after the counting of votes is over. A bench headed by Chief Justice of India Sanjeev Khanna ordered the Election Commission not to erase or reload any data from EVMs.
It has asked the Election Commission to furnish in detail how EVMs erase their memory and the microcontrollers following every election. Chief Justice Khanna added that the matter was not adversarial and “if the losing candidate demands, the engineer can give the assurance that there is no tampering “.
It came out during the hearing that the BEL engineers had uploaded dummy symbols and data in the EVMs and cleared the data from the original machines. Chief Justice then wanted to know for what reason this data was being cleared, and immediately issued an instruction that EVM data should not be cleared.
The court’s remarks came while hearing a petition filed by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) in Haryana along with a set of Congress leaders. The petitions have sought the court’s direction to the Election Commission to formulate a policy for verifying the actual burnt memory and microcontroller components of EVMs.
It also seeks that the engineers should verify the burnt memory and microcontroller to prove that the EVMs are tamperproof. The matter has been listed for further hearing on March 17.
