India's Opposition, led by Congress party's Rahul Gandhi, has accused the Election Commission of rigging the electoral processes. Gandhi even held a full-blown demonstration to support his claims earlier this month. The ECI has denied all charges, the first against it in India's history.
Now Rahul Gandhi has accused the ECI of refusing to share digital voter records, detailing what he said was a list of errors after his supporters spent weeks combing through vast piles of registration lists by hand.
Congress party's most recent claim came on August 29, which pointed out discrepancies in Bihar’s electoral rolls. The party, which holds 90 seats in the Lok Sabha, 947 voters in Nidani village of Bodh Gaya are listed under a single house number. But this was just one of many claims.
Rahul Gandhi vs Election Commission
Gandhi said his party lost dozens of seats in the 2024 parliamentary elections because of vote rigging. Gandhi claimed that the ECI manipulated voter rolls to favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party.
He said some people voted multiple times, citing bulk registrations from one dwelling and seemingly bogus addresses.
In a presentation to reporters on August 7, Gandhi pointed to a parliamentary constituency his party narrowly lost as an "open and shut" example of the alleged irregularities.
Over 100,000 "fake" votes were cast in the constituency, he said, courtesy of duplicate voters.
His Congress party lost the seat by just over 30,000 votes.
"Our demand from the ECI is clear -- be transparent and release digital voter rolls so that people and parties can audit them," Gandhi said.
A day after he held the press conference in which he pointed to a "vote chori" model being allegedly used in various constituencies across the country, Gandhi released the video explaining the investigation done by the Congress and what the analysis of data of an assembly segment in Karnataka from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls suggests.
Citing the probe, Gandhi goes on to repeat his claims in the video that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" through five types of manipulation in the assembly segment of Mahadevapura in Karnataka's Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat.
He says that 1,00,250 votes were stolen in the Mahadevapura assembly segment in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
"I am confident that there are more than 100 such seats in India. What has happened here has happened in those seats as well," Gandhi says.
"If the BJP had 10-15 seats less, Modi would not have been the prime minister and there would have been an INDIA bloc government," he says in the video and goes on to talk about the five types of 'vote chori' found in the Mahadevapura assembly segment.
