A review petition has been filed questioning the Supreme Court’s decision to turn down a plea to tally every voter verifiable paper audit trail slip with votes cast through EVMs.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is set to hear another petition seeking immediate release of absolute voter turnout data after a delay in publication of figures for the first two phases of the Lok Sabha polls, The Hindu reported. The court is set to hear the petition, filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, on Friday.

Meanwhile, the review petition, filed by Arun Kumar Agarwal, argued that the Supreme Court’s observation that such auditing will increase the need for manpower or delay the election results is “not correct”. A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta had in April turned down the suggestion to return to a ballot-based system of voting.

The review petition, filed through advocate Neha Rathi, said the order incorrectly notes that 5 percent of the VVPAT slips are tallied with votes cast, when in practice only 1.97 percent of VVPAT slips are tallied with EVM votes.

In its April 26 verdict, the court had directed the Election Commission of India and other authorities to take certain steps to boost confidence in EVMs. 

But Agrawal said that the entire discussion on the symbol loading units “ignores the fact that SLU is vulnerable and needs to be audited…court completely overlooked the possibility that the data in the SLU can have extra bytes other than just the necessary images.”

A batch of petitions were filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, Abhay Bhakchand Chhajed and Arun Kumar Aggarwal, seeking all VVPATs be verified instead of just those at five random polling stations. 

The EC opposed the pleas saying that it was another attempt to cast doubt over the functioning of EVMs and VVPATs on “vague and baseless” grounds. It argued that counting all VVPAT paper slips manually, as suggested, would not only be labour and time-intensive, but also be prone to “human error” and “mischief”.