1: Rahul Gandhi has alleged that the Election Commission of India of irregular elections across the country's assembly elections.
2: Mentioning voters' details, he stated 11,965 duplicate entries, 40,009 voters with invalid addresses and 10,452 individuals linked to single-room addresses.
The Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on August 7 presented details of Karnataka voters, finally dropping the promised “atom bomb” of proof, alleging conclusive evidence of large-scale electoral manipulation in India by the Election Commission (EC).
Gandhi has made similar claims in the past. In June, he wrote a column for a newspaper, ‘Match-fixing Maharashtra’, doubting the fairness of Indian elections. “I am not talking of small-scale cheating, but of industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions,” he stated.
With Bihar elections scheduled later this year amid Opposition's protests over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), Gandhi on X asked if the EC is still the 'Election Commission' or has it become the Bharatiya Janata Party's “Election Theft” wing?
He added that in Bihar, the Election Commission was caught red-handed stealing votes in the name of SIR.
As for Karnataka, the Congress party last month claimed that it has 100 percent proof of malpractice in the state’s constituency, adding that while the ECI officials might think they can get away with it, but Congress is “going to come for them.”
On Thursday, at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, nearly 50 senior leaders of the Opposition-led INDIA bloc convened for a high-stakes dinner diplomacy event. At the heart of the evening was a detailed presentation titled "Democracy Destroyed," where Gandhi briefed the INDIA bloc leadership on alleged booth-level manipulation. The same presentation was later shared with the media.
The Congress had won nearly all the Assembly segments—six out of seven—except Mahadevapura, where the BJP registered a sweeping victory with a margin of 1,14,046 votes. That one seat played a decisive role in tilting the Lok Sabha result in their favour, Gandhi said.
He enlisted five different ways through which the alleged vote chori (theft) was orchestrated: duplicate voters, fake and invalid addresses, bulk voters at a single address, invalid photos and the misuse of Form 6, which is given to first-time voters for enrolment
“You are not in the business of destroying Indian democracy, you are in the business of protecting it. This is a crime that is being committed against the Indian Constitution, against the Indian flag, ” he said in his message to the EC.
Gandhi’s data-backed analysis outlined five distinct categories of alleged voter list manipulation:
11,965 duplicate entries, with some voters listed multiple times across different booths
40,009 voters registered with invalid addresses
10,452 individuals linked to single-room addresses, raising questions of authenticity
4,132 entries with missing or unidentifiable photographs
33,692 so-called “first-time” voters, many aged between 70 and 95, allegedly added through Form 6.
Gandhi alleged that there were cases where a single individual appeared in “four polling booths” and voted multiple times. “There are thousands of such voters who have voted multiple times in different states. A total of 11,965 votes have been stolen like this,” the Leader of Opposition said, while displaying voter lists featuring the photograph of a person he identified as Gurkirat Singh Dang.
According to Gandhi, Dang's name appeared in the electoral rolls of four different polling booths within Mahadevpura.
He then presented another set of voter lists, this time with the photograph of an individual he identified as Adtiya Srivastava, claiming the same person was registered as a voter in two polling booths in Karnataka, and one each in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. “… Same name, the same address, the same person in four different polling booths. And this is not just one person, this is thousands of people in one Assembly,” he said.
Speaking of the 40,009 voters registered with invalid or no addresses, with arbitrary alphabets under father’s names, Gandhi said, “These are of three types: either an address that doesn’t exist, or the house number is zero, or the address can’t be verified. They have fake details in columns such as father’s name, etc … Father’s name in one case ‘ilsdfhug’, in another ‘dfoigoidf’.”
As he went through the presentation, he zoomed in on the details, giving details of “bulk voters” with the same address.
“This is House no 35 … There is a single-room house where 80 voters are shown living: different names, different families. We sent people to check, and they got beaten up. And then there is another one … 46 voters all from different families living in a single bedroom house, and when we go there, they don’t exist. There were 40,009 such voters in the constituency.”
He spoke of similar irregularities in the alleged misuse of Form 6.
The Congress leader stated that this malpractice is not an isolated incident but a patterns occurring at a huge scae across the country “in state after state after state.,”
“Not giving machine-readable voter lists and disallowing CCTV footage by changing the law convinced us that the EC colluded with the BJP to steal elections,” he claimed.
Speaking of the difference of 22,779 votes between the BJP and Congress in the Haryana Assembly elections that happened in 2024, he stated that Congress has identified a pattern in the country that the BJP is sweeping one or two seats , while there is a sweep in some seats, the rest are seeing natural competition.
Addressing the poll body, he said, “One day, the Opposition is going to come to power and you will see what we do to you. Because you are attacking the foundation of what our founding fathers built and we are not going to allow you, no matter who you are.”
Lastly, Gandhi asked the judiciary to intervene.
Taking note of Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of voter roll manipulation in a Karnataka Assembly seat, the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer has asked him to formally submit his evidence under oath. “You are kindly requested to sign and return the enclosed declaration/oath under Rule 20(3)(b) of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, along with the name(s) of such elector(s) so that necessary proceedings can be initiated.”
Responding to the request, the Gandhi said, “I am a politician, what I say to the people is my word. I am saying it to the people publicly, take it as an oath. Interestingly, they haven’t denied the information.”
On Friday, the Congress leadership, including party President Mallikarjun Kharge and Gandhi, is set to lead a protest march titled, Vote Adhikar Rally, to the Election Commission of India ECI office in Bengaluru.
Reacting to the allegations, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah called for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation. “He must resign and dissolve the government immediately,” the CM said in a post on X.