EVM Microcontroller's Programme Cannot Be Changed, EC Tells Supreme Court

The Election Commission of India today informed the Supreme Court that all three units of the EVM - Ballot Unit, Control Unit and VVPAT - have their own microcontroller that cannot be altered once data is burned into it. The ECI informed a bench presided over by Justice Sanjiv Khanna that these microcontrollers are kept in a secure unauthorised access module to avoid physical access. The poll body further said that the microcontrollers used in the EVMs are 'one-time programmable' and once this program is burnt into the device at the time of manufacturing, it cannot be altered later.

The bench was also told that two PSUs - Electronics Corporation of India Limited and Bharat Electronics Limited - prepare the symbol loading units (SLUs). The EC also clarified that the data in the EVMs remains preserved till the expiry of the 45-day limitation period after the counting is over.

The poll officials further said that the Chief Electoral Officer writes to the Registrar General of the concerned High Courts to know if an election petition has been filed challenging the results. Once they receive a negative reply, then the district officers are directed to open the strong rooms. "If any election petition is found to be filed, the strong rooms remain sealed and “nobody touches it," said the ECI.

In April 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the ECI to increase the VVPAT slips from one Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) per Assembly constituency to five. It had issued guidelines for mandatory verification of VVPAT slips, out of five randomly selected polling stations, after completing the final round of counting votes recorded in EVMs. A VVPAT is considered an independent verification system for voting machines, allowing voters to verify whether they have correctly cast their votes.

Last week, the top court reserved its verdict on a batch of public interest litigations (PILs) seeking mandatory cross-verification of the votes cast in EVMs with Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips.