'Choreographed Polling, Duplicate Voters': Rahul Gandhi Takes On Election Commission
Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission of colluding with the BJP to manipulate the 2024 elections, citing voter fraud in Karnataka's Mahadevapura.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India, accusing the poll body of colluding with the BJP to manipulate the outcome of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Addressing a press conference in the national capital, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha alleged widespread voter fraud, pointing specifically to Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly segment under the Bangalore Central parliamentary seat.
“This was ‘bhayankar chori’, a massive theft of votes,” Gandhi said, claiming that over one lakh fraudulent votes were identified out of approximately 6.5 lakh total votes in the constituency.
He cited findings from what he described as an internal investigation by Congress, which uncovered duplicate voters, invalid addresses, and bulk voting patterns in the area.
Bangalore Central had witnessed a tight contest during the recent general elections, with Congress candidate Mansoor Ali Khan leading for much of the counting day. However, BJP’s P.C. Mohan eventually edged ahead, securing victory by a narrow margin of 32,707 votes, he said.
Gandhi’s criticism went beyond localised allegations. He questioned the Election Commission’s refusal to share voter rolls in machine-readable electronic formats, suggesting that this practice prevents parties from effectively analysing the data for discrepancies.
“This is a challenge. What we’re being handed is a seven-foot stack of paper,” he said, holding up printed voter rolls. “If I want to find out if someone’s name appears twice, I have to manually compare each image. It's an extremely tedious process.”
The Congress MP alleged that the EC was deliberately obstructing transparency by providing only hard copies that are incompatible with optical character recognition (OCR) tools, making automated analysis virtually impossible.
“If we had electronic access, it would take just 30 seconds to flag duplicate entries,” he added. “Instead, it took us six months to audit Mahadevapura alone.”
Gandhi's explosive claims come just days before he is set to lead a major protest march in Karnataka, aimed at highlighting alleged electoral irregularities and demanding accountability from the poll body.
In response to the allegations by Rahul Gandhi, the Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka confirmed a meeting with the Congress delegation on August 8. The CEO stated that electoral rolls were transparently shared in November 2024 and January 2025. No official appeals were filed by the INC post-publication.
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