New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday introduced additional layers of investigation into the revised technical standard operating process to test the integrity of electronic voting machines (EVMs), by ordering that if a candidate wanted to conduct mock voting on EVMs, the machine’s symbol loading unit could not be changed.A bench of Chief Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Dipankar Dutta said, “If a candidate wants to conduct a fake pole on EVMs for testing his integrity (during voting), he can request in writing. Counting votes on EVMs, re -voting will be displayed in advance and then will be used during polls.”Accepting the revised technical SOP of the pole panel stated by senior advocate Maninder Singh, the bench said it was satisfied with the SOP that included self-diagnosis to confirm the loyalty of the burnt program and when EVMs are associated with other EVMs.However, it said that engineer Bharat Electrical Limited And will check and certify the Electronics Corporation of India Limited that the software and burnt memory of voting machines are not tampered with.The EC said, “In the proposed amendment, the EVM units will be clinically investigated and after that, the engineers deployed for the process will inspect the units and give a certificate that the EVM was not tampered with or modified.”
