Can an order passed under the post-result checking and verification mechanism be assailed under Article 226 in derogation of the election petition remedy?

Paragraph 15This brings the court to the petitioner’s reliance on Association for Democratic Reforms (supra). The said judgment, as the affidavit itself recites, was concerned with directions to strengthen public confidence in the integrity of EVMs by providing an additional post-result safeguard, permitting candidates placed second or third to seek verification of a sample of machines. Nothing in that judgment suggests that an order passed under the resultant Standard Operating Procedure was intended to be justiciable under Article 226 of the Constitution of India in derogation of the statutory election petition remedy, or that the Supreme Court intended to carve out, for this narrow category of post-result verification, an exception to the constitutional bar under Article 329(b) of the Constitution of India. The verification mechanism was engrafted as an additional safeguard and not in substitution of the remedy of an election petition and, in fact, if any material is gathered during such verification, it would go to strengthen the evidentiary foundation of an election petition, rather than furnish an independent cause of action in writ jurisdiction. The reliance placed on that judgment, therefore, does not advance the petitioner’s case on maintainability.