Counting and cross-verification of 100% VVPAT paper slips with Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections- SC

NEWS- The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard the pleas seeking counting and cross-verification of 100% VVPAT paper slips with Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The petitioners moved the top court against the present system of counting VVPATs in 5 randomly selected polling booths per Assembly. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has termed the demand by the petitioners as "regressive" and equivalent to reverting to paper ballot system. The court today heard the petitioners and adjourned the hearing till Thursday. 
The petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) in 2023, stated that the current practice by the ECI to count the electronically recorded votes in all of the EVMs and cross-verify EVMs with the VVPATs in only 5 randomly selected polling booth per assembly constituency is not sufficient.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan began his argument and told the court that the EVMs can be manipulated. Bhushan said, "we aren’t saying they are manipulated or have been. We are saying that they can be manipulated as both EVM and VVPAT have two kinds of chips. First memory in the chip that can be programmed and a flash memory used during symbol loading."
Bhushan further said that most European countries have done away with EVM as they found them unreliable. He contended that EVMs are programmable and so a malicious program can be installed.
A Bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta heard the case and posed several questions to the petitioners.The petitioners gave a bunch of suggestions to the bench on how the possibility of manipulation in EVMs can be dealt with. One of those suggestions was to bring back the ballot system as many European countries have done so after finding EVMs unreliable. The top court however rejected the proposal and said that everyone has seen what are the drawbacks of the Ballot Paper system."We are in our sixties...we have seen what used to happen during the ballot paper system" Justice Khanna remarked. 
Justice Khanna while hearing the petitioners said that "Normally, human interventions lead to problems and human weakness can be there which includes biases as well. Machines normally without human intervention will give you accurate results. Yes, the problem arises when there is human intervention or makes unauthorised changes when they are around the software or machine. If you have any suggestion to avert this, then you can give us that."