Congress to Persist in Campaigning for Expanded VVPAT Implementation: Jairam Ramesh

Congress will continue its campaign for wider use of VVPATs, despite the Supreme Court's rejection of petitions seeking complete cross-verification of EVM votes. The party claims it was not involved in these petitions and maintains that greater VVPAT use increases public trust in elections.

The Congress will continue with its political campaign on greater use of VVPATs to increase public trust in the electoral process, the party said on Friday after the Supreme Court rejected pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs. The Congress was not a party, directly or indirectly, to the petition on VVPATs rejected by the Supreme Court today, party general secretary Jairam Ramesh said. ''We have taken note of the verdict of the 2-judge bench and our political campaign on the greater use of VVPATs to increase public trust in the electoral process will continue,'' Ramesh said in a post on X.

The Supreme Court has rejected pleas seeking complete cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and said ''blindly distrusting'' any aspect of the system can breed unwarranted scepticism.

Maintaining that ''democracy is all about striving to build harmony and trust between all institutions'', a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta delivered two concurring verdicts and dismissed all the pleas in the matter, including those seeking to go back to ballot papers in elections.

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