CEC shielding ‘vote chors’, undermining democracy: Rahul; election panel rubbishes claim

Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi again hit out at the Election Commission on Thursday, alleging mass deletion of votes in the Aland constituency in Congress-ruled Karnataka during the 2023 Assembly elections. The poll body denied the allegations, terming these “baseless and incorrect”.

Rahul accused Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar of shielding “vote chors” and undermining democracy.

The fresh allegations of vote theft by the Congress leader came just two months after he had, on August 7, levelled similar allegations of large-scale removal of voters’ names in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat during the 2024 General Election.

While the EC said on Thursday that names of voters could not be deleted online by anybody, as “misconceived” by Rahul, it accepted that in 2023, certain unsuccessful attempts were made for the deletion of electors’ names in the Aland Assembly constituency and an FIR was filed by the EC to investigate the matter.

The Aland seat was won by Subhash Guttedar of the BJP in 2018 and BR Patil of the Congress in 2023. The Congress had won the 2023 Assembly elections in Karnataka.

The poll body’s reaction came hours after Rahul levelled the allegations at a press conference.

“Aland is a constituency in Karnataka. Somebody tried to delete 6,018 votes,” Rahul alleged. “We don’t know the total number of votes that were deleted in Aland in the 2023 elections. They are much higher than 6,018, but somebody got caught deleting these 6,018 votes, and it was by coincidence,” he said.

These voter IDs, he alleged, were deleted using fake logins and phone numbers from outside the state. He also alleged that this voter deletion was being executed not by individuals, but with the help of a software in a centralised manner.

According to Rahul, the Karnataka CID, which is probing the case, had written 18 letters in 18 months seeking information such as destination IP addresses, device ports and OTP trails connected with the deletions. “Yet, the EC has refused to provide the information,” he said, adding that such stonewalling left “no doubt” that the CEC was shielding those responsible.

The Congress leader produced voters whose names, he alleged, had been used without consent to delete entries from the electoral rolls. In one case, a woman, Godabai, was shown to have deleted 12 votes; another voter, Suryakant, allegedly deleted 12 names in just 14 minutes. A third, Nagraj, was recorded as deleting two names in 36 seconds, at 4.07 am. “This pattern proves it was being done through a software,” Rahul alleged, pointing to a “systematic fraud”.

The EC fact-checked his claims, terming these baseless.

Hours later, Rahul, in a post on X, escalated his attack on CEC Gyanesh Kumar and accused him of blocking the FIR and CID investigation into the alleged fraud in the Aland Assembly constituency.

“If this vote theft had not been caught and the 6,018 votes had been deleted, our candidate could have lost the election,” Rahul said.

The poll body said all information being sought by Rahul had been made available by the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Karnataka to the state CID two years ago.

In a post on X, the Karnataka CEO said in December 2022, the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) of the Aland constituency had received 6,018 applications for the deletion of names. However, suspecting the genuineness of such a large number of applications submitted online for deletion of electors’ names, these were verified. Only 24 of the 6,018 applications were found to be genuine and the remaining 5,994 were found to be incorrect. Accordingly, the 24 applications were accepted while the rest were rejected and those 5,994 names were not deleted.

The Karnataka CEO said based on the inquiry findings by BLOs, the ERO of the Aland constituency had lodged an FIR at the local police station on February 21, 2023. All available information regarding the matter was later handed over to the SP of Kalaburagi district (under which the Aland constituency falls) on the orders of the EC on September 6, 2023.

The confrontation between the Congress and the EC has escalated in the run-up to the Bihar Assembly polls, where the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has led to the Opposition amplifying the allegations of large-scale deletion of voters’ names in the garb of revision of the voter list.