Addressing a press conference, Gandhi said the Election Commission must stop this and provide within a week information sought by the Karnataka CID in an investigation into voter deletions.
He mentioned at the outset that these were not the “hydrogen bomb” of revelations that he has promised and those will come soon.
He cited details of alleged attempts to delete votes from the Aland constituency in 2023. “I am going to make a serious claim about Gyanesh Kumar. I am not saying this lightly. The CEC is protecting vote chors and the people who have destroyed Indian democracy,” the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha alleged.
Someone has been systematically targeting millions of voters for deletion across India, he claimed. “I am the leader of Opposition and I will not say anything which is not backed by 100% proof,” Gandhi said.
Gandhi said someone tried to delete 6,018 votes in Aland and got caught by coincidence and alleged that names of voters of the Congress were being deleted systematically.
“The booth-level officer noticed that her uncle’s vote got deleted and found her neighbour had deleted the vote of her uncle. She asked her neighbour who said he had no idea. It was found that some other force hijacked the process and deleted the vote — and as luck would have it got caught,” Gandhi said.
He claimed that 6,018 applications were filed impersonating voters and this filing was done automatically using mobile numbers from outside Karnataka.
In August, Gandhi cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and claimed that over one lakh votes were “stolen” through manipulation in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka.
EC’s response
The EC has dubbed Gandhi’s allegations as incorrect and baseless. “Allegations made by Rahul Gandhi are incorrect and baseless. No deletion of any vote can be done online by any member of the public, as misconceived by Gandhi,” it said.
No deletion can take place without giving an opportunity of being heard to the affected person, the EC asserted.
