EVM has passed every test, we should denounce attempts to undermine democracy: President

She thanked the Election Commission for the conduct of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, in which around 64 crore voters participated.

“We need to preserve and protect this trust to sustain our robust democracy. We must realise that hurting the faith of people in democratic institutions and the electoral process is like cutting the very branch on which we all are sitting. We should collectively denounce every attempt to undermine the credibility of our democracy. We all remember those times when ballot papers were snatched and looted. To ensure the sanctity of the electoral process, it was decided to use EVMs. The EVM has passed every test, from the Supreme Court to the people’s court, in the last few decades,” Murmu said.

The President’s comments come in the wake of legal challenges to the use of EVMs, VVPATs and other electoral procedures. In one such case, the Supreme Court in April rejected the demand for a return to ballot papers or 100% counting of VVPAT slips.

In the past, Presidential addresses have mentioned the recently-conducted elections, but have not included a defence of EVMs. After the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, then-President Pranab Mukherjee congratulated the Election Commission for conducting the polls successfully. In 2019, after the Lok Sabha elections that year, then-President Ram Nath Kovind too congratulated the EC. In his address, Kovind said India’s democracy had matured and that frequent elections were impacting the pace and continuity of development works. He said there was a need for simultaneous elections. Incidentally, as former President, Kovind, chaired the government-appointed high-level committee on simultaneous elections which recommended ways to implement “one nation, one election” in March this year.