New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday, August 7, cited an analysis of data from a Lok Sabha constituency in Karnataka from the 2024 general elections to allege that the Election Commission of India (ECI) is colluding with the BJP to “steal elections” and called it a “crime” against the Constitution.
Addressing a press conference at the AICC headquarters here, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said the Congress put together a team and collected “concrete evidence of vote chori” in six months.
If the EC does not give us machine-readable data for the past 10-15 years and the CCTV footage, they are partaking in the crime, Gandhi said.
“The judiciary needs to get involved in this because the democracy that we love so much does not exist,” the former Congress president said.
Talking to the media through an online presentation, Gandhi said they analysed the voter data of Lok Sabha constituency of Bangalore Central and the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in it from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
He said in the whole Lok Sabha seat, the Congress got 6,26,208 votes while the BJP got 6,58,915, a margin of 32,707.
Gandhi pointed out that while the Congress won six out of seven segments, it lost in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in which it was defeated by over 1,14,000 votes.
He claimed there was “vote chori” of 1,00,250 votes in the constituency with 11,965 duplicate voters in one assembly segment, 40,009 voters with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.
Alleging that is being committed throughout the country, he said this is a “crime against the Indian Constitution and the Indian flag”.
Gandhi said the Congress would like to remind the Election Commission of India that it is in the business of protecting elections.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the PM with a slender majority and needed to “steal” only 25 seats to stay in power, he said.
The BJP won 25 seats in the Lok Sabha polls with less than 33,000 votes, Gandhi said.
He said the foundation of our Constitution is based on the fact that one person gets one vote.
“When we look at polls, the fundamental thing is how to secure ‘one man, one vote’ idea. Are the right people allowed to vote? Are fake people being added? Is the voter list true or not?” he said.
“For some time there has been suspicion among the public. Anti-incumbency hits every single party, but the BJP is the only party that does not suffer anti-incumbency in a democratic framework,” he said.
Exit polls go massively wrong and so do internal surveys, he said
Gandhi alleged that elections are “choreographed ” these days lasting months, when earlier, with minimal technology, the polls were conducted in the country together.
“Not giving machine-readable voter list and disallowing CCTV footage by changing the law convinced us that the EC colluded with the BJP to steal elections,” he claimed.
He also alleged that EC is looking to “destroy” evidence of “vote chori” in the whole country.
The Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka asked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to share names of electors he claimed were either included or excluded wrongfully from the voters’ list of the state along with a signed declaration for the poll authorities to initiate “necessary proceedings” in the matter.
In a letter to Gandhi soon after he levelled allegations of vote fraud, the state poll officer said that during a press conference in the national capital, “you had mentioned about the inclusion of ineligible electors and exclusion of eligible electors in the Electoral Rolls… .”
“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.”
