Earlier this month, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission of colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party to manipulate voter lists and swing results in favour of the ruling party.
Published Aug 20, 2025 | 9:22 PM ⚊ Updated Aug 20, 2025 | 9:34 PM
Gandhi had alleged that his party's examination revealed over one lakh “stolen” votes.
Synopsis: A Public Interest Litigation has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking an inquiry into allegations by Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi of large-scale irregularities in the electoral rolls of the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in Bengaluru Central constituency.
A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking an inquiry into allegations made by Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, about large-scale irregularities in the electoral rolls of the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in the Bengaluru Central constituency.
The petition, filed by advocate Rohit Pandey, has sought the formation of a Special Investigation Team to conduct an inquiry into the matter. It has also urged the court to issue directions to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to ensure transparent, fair, and free elections.
Further, the petition has requested that during elections, the ECI should complete the collection of voting details and the archiving of CCTV footage.
It also called for the publication of electoral rolls in accessible, machine-readable, and OCR-compliant formats, along with the release of rolls in a modern format suitable for electronic search. Separate directions to the Election Commission for this purpose have also been sought.
Earlier this month, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused the ECI of colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to manipulate voter lists and swing results in favour of the ruling party.
He said his party had analysed the voters’ list and polling data from Mahadevapura and found irregularities in 1,00,250 votes. He also pointed to the addition of more than one crore new voters in Maharashtra after the Lok Sabha elections and before the State Assembly polls.
“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.
According to him, the BJP’s margin in Mahadevapura determined the outcome in Bengaluru Central. “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 stated.
Gandhi further alleged that his team’s examination revealed over one lakh “stolen” votes. “One of the most shocking findings 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 said.
