"We Cannot Control Election": Supreme Court Comes Down Heavily On Petitioners Casting Suspicion Despite ECI's Clarification

After the Election Commission of India (ECI) gave clarification on the Supreme Court's doubts, the bench came down heavily on petitioners raising questions and asked them to rely on the ECI technical data.

On ECI's claim that the microcontrollers are one-time programmable, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan argued that flash memory is always reprogrammable. The SC responded by saying, "Flash memory has no program and only symbols."

However, Bhushan continued casting doubts by saying, "If a malicious program is loaded along with the symbol." To this Justice Datta said, "We cannot control the election Mr Bhushan, we cannot control another constitutional authority."

On senior advocate Santhosh Paul's argument that there are softwares available in this country to rig polls, Justice Datta said, "Can we issue a mandamus on the basis of a suspicion?"

Justice Khanna pointed out that the petitioners themselves are not sure as the report cited by them says "doubtful". He also questioned how giving a bar code to each candidate (one of the petitioner's argument) can help the process.

He further asserted that the court has already intervened twice when there was a scope for improvement and cited, "Once, when we said VVPAT should be mandatory. The second time, when we increased from one to five."