The Election Commission (EC) has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court addressing challenges regarding its special intensive revision (SIR) process. The EC asserts that all three SIR orders issued in June 2025, October 2025 and May 2026 were unanimous decisions made by the Commission, emphasising that these orders were not unilateral and were based on collective consensus among all members. It clarified that the online changes to Form 6 were intended to facilitate the SIR and not a unilateral amendment.There is widespread cynicism about the veracity of this affidavit and the Congress has openly questioned it. It described the EC’s affidavit as “deceptive, deceitful and duplicitous” in addition to being “extremely damaging to itself”. The six points raised by the party concerned the declaration attached to Form 6, approval of SIR orders, alleged centralisation of electoral roll management through ECINET, functioning of the EC’s IT division, alleged misuse of Form 7 and what the Congress described as the affidavit’s failure to deny media revelations about alleged irregularities.Doubting the credibility and veracity of sworn affidavits filed by the EC in India’s highest court of law is a very serious and painful matter. But going by my past experience in the Supreme Court in the electronic voting machine (EVM)-related matters, it looks as if it is a habit for the EC to file such false affidavits and for the court to accept them as gospel truth and give favourable judgments. Let us see how.In late 2018, myself along with former ambassador K.P. Fabian and ex-banker Franco Thomas filed a civil writ petition, numbered 273 of 2019, in the Supreme Court on the lack of integrity and fairness in the EVM voting system. The prayer was to order the EC to count and cross-verify the voter-verifiable paper audit trails (VVPATs) at least in a randomly chosen 30% of all polling stations within each assembly constituency.This plea was based on the opinion of S.K. Nath, a former director-general of the Central Statistics Organisation and an international consultant. Twenty-one political parties under the ‘leadership’ of Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu also filed a separate writ petition, numbered 1,514 of 2018, seeking 50% a VVPAT slip count.The EC filed a common counter-affidavit making some blatantly false claims. Among other falsehoods in the affidavit was that there had not been any mismatch between the VVPAT and EVM tallies conducted over the previous two years, and that the poll body had only received a single complaint about a VVPAT recording an incorrect vote since 2013.The EC also made the absurd claim that 50% VVPAT verification would delay the counting process by up to five or six days – whereas even under the paper ballot system with 100% counting, almost all results, including in large parliament constituencies, were declared well within a day.But the ‘height of perjury’ was reached with the false claim relating to a report of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in favour of a minuscule sample size. The EC’s affidavit said that a three-member committee of the ISI gave a report considering a general election in the entire country as a single event and claiming that tallying 479 randomly selected booths (out of over ten lakh booths in the country) was enough to verify the fairness of the elections above a 99.99% confidence level!Upon verification, it turned out that this “Committee” was set up by a deputy election commissioner by writing a letter, not to the ISI’s head office in Kolkata but the head of its Delhi unit, asking for “associating with the commission and collaborating towards resolving the issues elaborated above…”. Instead of asking the ISI to form an expert committee, it only asked the director of its Delhi office to associate with the EC to examine the issue.A reply to an RTI query shows that this letter addressed to the Delhi director was received but that the ISI in Kolkata had no further record of any action taken or the formation of a formal “ISI” committee as per its standard operating procedure. The composition of the body seems to have been a private decision worked out by the EC and the Delhi director, without any ISI procedure being observed. The report therefore is a private one and not that of the ISI.Despite this fact, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the EC, directing the verification of VVPAT papers in five booths per assembly constituency or assembly segments in a Lok Sabha constituency. This meant that the Supreme Court mandated a 2% cross-verification as against the 30% requested in our petition and 50% in the petition filed by Naidu and others.We and the political parties filed a review petition in the apex court with strong evidence of EVM-VVPAT fraud and malfunctioning in the first three phases of the 2019 general election as well as perjury committed by the EC regarding the “ISI report”. The review petition also had solid grounds – factual, constitutional and legal. Yet the Supreme Court summarily dismissed it on May 7, 2019 without even listening to the senior advocates who had lined up for argument!Then came the civil writ petition 434 of 2023, filed by the Association For Democratic Reforms (ADR) against the EC on the integrity and fairness of EVM voting, pointing out its egregious faults. This petition was backed up by a comprehensive report prepared by the Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE) chaired by a former Supreme Court judge titled, ‘An inquiry into India’s election system: Is the Indian EVM and VVPAT system fit for democratic elections?’, published in January 2021.The CCE report is based on depositions from top national and international experts with domain knowledge in computer science, election management and statistics. Some of them are Ronald L. Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan; Poorvi L. Vora and Bhagirath Narahari of George Washington University; Philip B. Stark of the University of California, Berkeley; Vanessa Teague of the University of Melbourne; Sandeep Shukla of IIT Kanpur; Subhashis Banerjee of IIT Delhi and K.V. Subrahmanyam of the Chennai Mathematical Institute.These experts categorically said that “due to the absence of end-to-end verifiability, the EVM/VVPAT system as being practiced by the [EC] is not verifiable and therefore unfit for democratic elections”. They also wanted the electronic voting system to be re-designed to be software- and hardware-independent in order to be verifiable or auditable.As coordinator of the CCE, I filed an intervening petition highlighting these and other relevant issues along with a copy of the report.The EC filed counter affidavit with several falsehoods:1. Affidavit: There was no direction in Fact: The EC has deliberately misinterpreted the Supreme Court order in the Swamy case, which clearly states that a “paper trail” is an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections, and that the confidence of voters in EVMs can be achieved only with the introduction of the “paper trail”.S.Y. Quraishi, the former chief election commissioner who piloted the VVPAT initiative, said that the intended purpose of this device is full cross-verification of EVM memory with VVPAT slips and it is for the EC to make it possible.2. Affidavit: In view of demands from political parties to count 100% VVPATs, the ISI was engaged. The institute reported that undertaking slip-verification for 479 EVMs and VVPATs is sufficient to to indicate a confidence level of 4 sigma or 99.9936%.Fact: Since the Supreme Court did not even look into the perjury charges made with evidence in the review petition, the EC has brazenly repeated this falsehood!3. Courts have reposed faith in EVMsFact: Along with Chandrababu Naidu’s case (civil writ petition 273 of 2019), the Supreme Court passed this order in the linked civil writ petition 23 of 2019:“We express our reluctance to go into the issues regarding the integrity of the EVMs which have been raised at a belated stage. The petition was filed in the month of December 2018 raising various technical issues which are not possible to be gone into at this stage. With the aforesaid observations, the writ petition shall stand closed.”It is clear that EC lied in the Supreme Court.These are only a few examples and there are many more. Despite these falsehoods, the Supreme Court dismissed the ADR’s petition and upheld the continued use of EVMs and the existing VVPAT protocols.Despite the CCE report from some of the world’s top professionals and experts on the serious flaws of the EVM system, the court found no substantial or inherent flaws in it. The court blindly believed what the EC said and passed the order. The court even condemned the paper ballot system as archaic and primitive, whereas this system is considered as the ‘gold standard of elections’ in all advanced democracies!Because the Supreme Court is so accommodative and did not bother about the veracity or credibility of its affidavits in the EVM matter, the EC probably believes that the same will happen in the SIR matter also! Let us wait and see!M.G. Devasahayam, formerly of the IAS, is coordinator of the Citizens’ Commission on Elections.