ECI dismissed the claims and said that anyone can download the Electoral Roll for any of the 36 states and Union territories.
Published Aug 08, 2025 | 3:17 PM ⚊ Updated Aug 08, 2025 | 3:17 PM
The Election Commission of India (Wikimedia Commons)
Synopsis: Social media users claimed that the electoral rolls of several states had been taken down by the agency. Meanwhile, the ECI dismissed the claims, stating that anyone could download the electoral rolls. However, an independent attempt by South First showed that the rolls could not be downloaded.
Following Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi’s claim that the voters’ list has been manipulated by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to commit voting fraud, social media users claimed on Friday, 8 August, that electoral rolls of several states have been taken down by the agency.
“E-Voter List pages from the websites of CEOs of states like Maharashtra, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are taken down. @ECISVEEP hits the panic button,” wrote a X user.
Meanwhile, ECI dismissed the claims and said that anyone can download the Electoral Roll for any of the 36 states and Union territories.
❌ This is a Fake News#ECIFactCheck
✅Anyone can download the Electoral Roll for any of 36 States/UTs through this link: https://t.co/wNot0e43bu https://t.co/2w2nf2NaUG pic.twitter.com/SrO599f9aA
— Election Commission of India (@ECISVEEP) August 8, 2025
To verify the claims, South First visited the official websites of the ECI to check the electoral rolls for the Lok Sabha election 2024.
After filing out all the required details to access the electoral rolls in Maharashtra and selecting a random constituency, no file could be downloaded, even after a dialogue box on the website showed success.
The same issue persisted for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
When the electoral rolls for Karnataka were checked for availability, South First tried to download the list of voters in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency. It was the constituency where the Congress conducted its research on the alleged manipulation of electoral rolls.
However, it was not different from the other states — showed success while no file was downloaded.
The same process was followed for all other South Indian states as well — ie. Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana — and the result was the same.
However, it is not clear whether the data has been purposefully removed or is due to any technical issues with the ECI website.
On Thursday, Rahul Gandhi addressed the media and said that the 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.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
