New Delhi: In an urgent hearing on Friday evening, the Supreme Court sought a response within a week from the Election Commission on a plea by an NGO seeking a directive to upload polling station-wise voter turnout data on its website within 48 hours of the conclusion of polling for each phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
The top court, urged earlier in the day by lawyer Prashant Bhushan to hear the plea urgently, assembled in the evening after an Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) function to bid farewell to Justice A.S. Bopanna.
Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud termed the request of the poll panel seeking time to respond to the plea as "fair."
The bench said the Election Commission should be given reasonable time to respond and listed the matter for hearing before an appropriate bench during the summer vacation on May 24, a day before the sixth phase of the seven-phase Lok Sabha polls.
Senior advocate Maninder Singh, appearing for the poll panel, said the NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has levelled "absolutely false allegations" in the plea. He noted that a recent judgment by another bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna, had addressed issues also part of the present case.
The Justice Khanna-led bench had on April 26 rejected pleas for reviving paper ballots and 100 per cent cross-verification of votes cast on electronic voting machines with voter verifiable paper audit trails.
Bhushan opposed Singh's submission, arguing that the issue relating to voter turnout data was not part of the earlier petition.
Earlier in the day, the CJI had asked the counsel appearing for the Election Commission to take instructions, indicating that the matter would be heard at the end of the board.
ADR had filed an interim application last week in its 2019 PIL, seeking directions to the poll panel to upload "scanned legible copies of Form 17C Part-I (Account of Votes Recorded)" of all polling stations immediately after the polls.
The NGO requested, "Direct the Election Commission to provide tabulated polling station-wise data in absolute figures of the number of votes polled as recorded in Form 17C Part-I after each phase of polling in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections and also a tabulation of constituency-wise figures of voter turnout in absolute numbers in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections."
