He alleged that the EC is “colluding with the BJP to rig elections” and described the manipulation as "a crime against the Constitution and the national flag."
Published Aug 07, 2025 | 2:51 PM ⚊ Updated Aug 07, 2025 | 2:57 PM
Rahul Gandhi presenting the data of the Congress investigation.
Synopsis: Rahul Gandhi said that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has colluded with the BJP to enact a massive voter fraud to swing election results in favour of the saffron party.
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said on Thursday, 7 August, that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has colluded with the BJP to enact a massive voter fraud to swing election results in favour of the saffron party.
The Congress leader said that the alliance partners of the Opposition INDIA bloc had suspicions of vote rigging after the elections in some states were postponed or other changes in dates were made.
He said that the grand old party analysed the voters’ list and voting data of the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in the Bengaluru Central constituency in Karnataka and found irregularity in 1,00,250 votes.
He said that the BJP won 25 Lok Sabha seats with a margin of less than 33,000 votes. “PM Modi needed to steal 25 seats to stay in power in 2024. This is why the EC is not giving us digital voter rolls,” he said.
According to him, after the Lok Sabha elections and before the state Assembly polls, over one crore new voters were added to the electoral rolls in Maharashtra alone. Despite multiple representations, the EC allegedly did not respond.
Data presented by Rahul Gandhi shows rigged votes in Mahadevapura.
“The voter list is the property of the country. But the EC refuses to give us the complete list. They even rejected a request for a machine-readable version and instead gave us non-readable paper copies,” he said.
He alleged that the EC is “colluding with the BJP to rig elections” and described the manipulation as “a crime against the Constitution and the national flag.”
“We didn’t know how it was rigged. So we formed a team and manually verified the voter lists — seven feet of stacked paper. It took us six months to analyse just one assembly constituency,” he said.
The investigation, he said, focused on the Mahadevapura assembly segment under a Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency.
“In Mahadevapura, Congress polled 1,15,586 votes and the BJP 2,29,632 — a margin of over 1.14 lakh. Congress won all other segments, but the BJP’s large margin here secured them the Lok Sabha seat,” he said.
Upon examining the data, the team allegedly found that over one lakh votes had been “stolen”. One of the most shocking findings, he claimed, was that the same voter appeared in four different polling booths.
“There were even cases of the same person voting in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. We found thousands of fake addresses — some voters had ‘0’ as their house number. Others had unverifiable or non-existent addresses,” he alleged.
The team also found multiple instances of implausible voter registrations — such as 80 people listed at a single address and 46 unrelated individuals registered at another.
“In some cases, our volunteers were threatened when they went to verify the addresses. We even found that 68 voters were listed with a brewery as their address,” he said.
He held up stacks of printed voter rolls and continued: “These paper lists were not machine-readable. Optical character recognition couldn’t work on them. This was deliberate. They didn’t want us to examine the data,” he alleged.
In another instance, the team found 33,692 new voters registered using Form 6, meant for first-time voters. However, the list allegedly included elderly voters and repeat entries.
“A 70-year-old woman named Shakun Rani appears twice in the list using Form 6 and has voted twice, as recorded by the EC. There were no 18–25-year-olds in the new voter list — only people aged 65, 70, 85,” he said.
According to him, similar patterns have emerged across the country. “In Haryana, Congress lost narrowly, but in one assembly segment in Karnataka alone, the BJP stole four times that margin. This is a nationwide fraud,” he claimed.
He accused the Election Commission of trying to erase evidence.
“The EC is not giving us data because this is happening across the country. And now, they want to destroy CCTV footage — because they don’t want us to find out that Shakun Rani voted twice,” he concluded.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
