For residents in the area, it was common to apply multiple times for a voter ID or an address change, only to be repeatedly rejected. Many began to feel it was a deliberate effort, a "conspiracy" against them.
Published Aug 20, 2025 | 11:00 AM ⚊ Updated Aug 20, 2025 | 11:00 AM
Whitefield is a rapidly growing IT hub with an influx of migrant population from across the country. It has a history of low voter turnout.
Synopsis: Since 2017, Bangalore Central constituency has witnessed repeated irregularities in its electoral rolls, including deletions, omissions and duplications, with online voter applications facing unusually high rejection rates. In Mahadevapura, which falls under this constituency, over 66 per cent of online applications were rejected between 2012 and 2018.
In 2018, a techie in Bengaluru’s Whitefield found that his voter application was rejected just three months before the Karnataka assembly elections, without any explanation.
He was not alone. Of the 13,395 online applications made between 2012 and January 2018, 8,867 (66 percent) were rejected, according to a submission by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) before the Karnataka High Court.
In comparison, only 12 percent of manual applications were rejected.
Whitefield is part of the Mahadevapura assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency, the very same currently under the radar after Congress’ allegations of massive vote theft came to the fore over the last few weeks.
Incidentally, the constituency has seen such voter irregularities before, with deletions, omissions and duplications persistently plaguing the electoral roll.
“There were a lot of discrepancies with voter registration on the online portal [www.voterreg.kar.nic.in], which was under the supervision of the BBMP. Applications were being rejected in bulk and no reason was given for the same by the Election Commission,” said Ajit Sequeira, member of Whitefield Rising, a community of citizen volunteers.
For residents in the area, it was common to apply multiple times for a voter ID or an address change, only to be repeatedly rejected. Many began to feel it was a deliberate effort, a “conspiracy” against them.
Whitefield is a rapidly growing IT hub with an influx of migrant population from across the country. It has a history of low voter turnout.
In the 2013 assembly polls, the voter turnout in Mahadevapura was 61 percent and BJP candidate Aravind Limbavali won by a margin of 6,149 votes. The trend was consistent in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections too, with Bangalore Central seeing a voter turnout of only 55.63 percent.
To help more residents register themselves on the electoral roll, several citizen-led groups launched ground-level campaigns. Whitefield Rising was one of them, with their Million Voter Rising campaign in 2016.
The aim was to help enrol as many voters as possible to the electoral rolls in Mahadevapura constituency, mainly in and around Whitefield, before the next election that year. They organised community camps and awareness sessions for voters, Sequeira said.
While initially political analysts blamed voter apathy for consistent low turnout, the campaign team found evidence of “mysterious” rejection of voter applications. Whitefield in particular saw a high number of such voter ID application omissions, according to activists.
In one such case, a gated apartment complex in the area had 58 applicants who were rejected without explanation.
The team also found that civic officials had not issued Form 12 to these voters following rejection of their applications, as per Election Commission of India (ECI) norms.
To demand action, the team approached the Karnataka High Court in 2018. Apart from the aforementioned concerns, Senior Advocate Udaya Holla, appearing for the petitioner trust, also submitted that 2,000 applications for registration had not been processed in Mahadevapura.
He argued that BBMP authorities were not accepting applications or issuing acknowledgements for the hard copy of applications received.
In response to these complaints, Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Sanjiv Kumar visited the electoral office at Mahadevapura in April 2018.
It was found that as of January 2018, 66.20 percent of the online applications had been rejected. Most of these applications were filed by voters on the National Voter Service Portal, with the help of the awareness drives and camps conducted by the Million Voter Rising team.
The CEO then ordered officials to re-open all the rejected applications individually.
However, the problem did not end there. Even in the months and years leading up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the campaign team complained regarding 3,000 voters’ applications being rejected.
The Mahadevapura constituency was again under the spotlight in 2022, months ahead of the 2023 Assembly Elections. An NGO, Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Trust, hired by the BBMP, was accused of tampering with electoral rolls.
An investigation by TheNewsMinute found that the NGO impersonated booth-level officers and collected personal data of electors, including Aadhaar number, caste and income, under the guise of Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) activities.
The NGO was active in Mahadevapura, Shivajinagar and Chickpet.
Incidentally, a few months later, Congress MLA from Shivajinagar constituency, Rizwan Arshad, found that nearly 8,000 voters from minority communities had been deleted from the electoral rolls.
The move to remove them from the list came in response to a complaint filed by BJP sympathisers in October 2022, listing out that 26,000 people were fake voters. They had been identified as either shifted out or dead. However, many of the voters were still residing in the homes they had lived in for decades.
The latest allegations of vote theft come in the backdrop of all these irregularities.
Electoral rolls analyst PG Bhat, in his blog posts over the years, has alleged that such electoral malpractices have been going on for more than a decade across the state.
In January 2021, he sent to the CEO of Karnataka and Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) of Bangalore, lists of a few lakh suspected duplicate voter records in the city.
He also demonstrated to these officials the gross inadequacy of ECI software in detecting duplicate records. “Not just a single voter. In lakhs we leave them behind, by design,” Bhat wrote in a blogpost in 2022.
(Edited by Dese Gowda)
