The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) to examine the plea seeking disclosure of final authenticated voter turnout data for all polling stations within 48 hours of polling. The poll panel said the petitioners—NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, TMC Lok Sabha member Mahua Moitra, and others—can meet the Election Commissioner to address their grievances.

As senior advocate Maninder Singh, appearing for the ECI, told the top court that a new Election Commissioner has been appointed and the petitioners can meet him to have their grievances redressed, a bench comprising Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna, Justice Sanjay Kumar, and Justice KV Viswanathan said the petitioners, Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, are at liberty to make a representation to the ECI within 10 days.

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Thereafter, the bench deferred the hearing in the case and posted it for consideration on July 28.

“List this in the week commencing July 28. Meanwhile, counsel for the ECI states that the petitioners may file a representation with ECI, and the ECI will give them a hearing and inform them about the same in advance. Let representation be made in 10 days,” the bench stated in its order.

In their pleas, both the ADR and Mahua Moitra sought directions to the poll panel to upload the scanned, legible copies of Form 17C Part-I (account of votes recorded) on its website.

During the hearing of the matter, senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Prashant Bhushan, appearing for Mahua Moitra and the ADR respectively, argued that there was a huge discrepancy between the EVM count and the number of votes.

The applications filed in a pending matter sought disclosure of final authenticated voter turnout data for all polling stations, including the number of votes polled in the Lok Sabha Elections 2024, within 48 hours of polling.

The NGO ADR had, in an application in 2024, alleged an inordinate delay in the publication of voter turnout data for the first two phases of polling in the elections and had sought direction to the poll panel to immediately upload an account of votes recorded in all polling stations after the close of polling in each phase.

Besides the delay in publishing voter turnout details for the first two phases of polling, the ADR, in its application, said there was a sharp spike (about 5-6 percent) in figures from the initial voter turnout percentages released by the Election Commission.

The ADR had sought a direction to 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 2024 Lok Sabha elections, and also a tabulation of constituency-wise voter turnout figures in absolute numbers in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The NGO had further sought the uploading of scanned, legible copies of Form 17C Part-II on the ECI website, containing the candidate-wise counting results after the compilation of the 2024 Lok Sabha election results.

The application said the voter turnout data for the first two phases of the Lok Sabha elections were published by the ECI on April 30, 11 days after the first phase of polling held on April 19 and four days after the second phase of polling held on April 26.