New Delhi, July 10 || The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday objected to the PILs filed by several NGOs and other political activists in the Supreme Court challenging its decision to conduct Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar.
Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, representing the poll body, objected to the locus standi of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and other PIL litigants.
“None of them are voters in Bihar! Before you (SC) are some sections of people who write articles and then file petitions. I have a serious objection to this,” submitted Dwivedi before a Bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi.
He said that ADR was recently deprecated by the Supreme Court, apparently referring to the observations made against it in the 100 per cent VVPAT verification judgment.
Rejecting a batch of pleas seeking mandatory cross-verification of the votes cast with Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips, the Supreme Court, in April 2024, had castigated the ADR for its prayer to return to the paper ballot system. The top court had said that the prayer revealed the ADR’s “real intention” to discredit the system of voting through the EVMs and derail the electoral process, by “creating unnecessary doubts” in the minds of the electorate.