Election Commission Rejects Rahul Gandhi's Allegations Of Deleting Votes As 'Incorrect' and 'Baseless'

The Election Commission of India (EC) on Thursday rejected Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi's allegation of deleting votes on a large scale in a centralised and automated manner as "incorrect and baseless."

"Allegations made by Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi are incorrect and baseless. No Deletion of any vote can be done online by any member of the public, as misconceived by Rahul Gandhi," EC said on X. The statement also mentioned that no deletion can take place without giving an opportunity of being heard to the affected person.

The Election Commission said that in 2023, certain unsuccessful attempts were made for the deletion of electors in the Aland Assembly Constituency and an FIR was filed by the authority of ECI itself to investigate the matter. "As per records, Aland Assembly Constituency was won by Subhadh Guttedar (BJP) in 2018 and BR Patil (INC) in 2023," it said.

Speaking at a special press conference at Indira Bhawan Auditorium in New Delhi, Gandhi mentioned that the Aland Assembly constituency in Karnataka as the prime example. He said that 6,018 voter deletion applications were filed by impersonators, submitted automatically using software and mobile numbers from outside the state.

According to him, the incident was discovered when a booth-level officer noticed her uncle’s vote had been deleted. The neighbour shown as responsible told her he had no knowledge of it, suggesting that the process was hijacked. Gandhi added that while 6,018 deletions were caught, the scale could be larger.

He claimed that “a software is picking up the first name in the booth and using it to delete voters,” and that deletions were carried out in a “call centre-level operation” using numbers registered in Delhi, Gurugram or Haryana.