Rahul Gandhi Alleges Massive Voter Roll Manipulation, Questions EC’s Impartiality

Claims Over 100,000 Votes in Karnataka Seat Rigged Through Roll Manipulation

August 8, 2025

Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has released a dossier that he said was compiled from electoral rolls in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly constituency, alleging that more than 100,000 votes were manipulated through five distinct forms of tampering, a claim made amid questions over the conduct of the Election Commission (EC).

In a presentation at the headquarters of the Congress party in New Delhi on Aug. 7, Gandhi said the categories of alleged malpractice included duplicate entries, invalid or fake addresses, multiple voters registered at a single address, incorrect photographs and misuse of Form 6, which is used for first time enrolment.

He displayed a photograph of a seven-foot stack of electoral rolls, along with slides and other images, as evidence that he said showed the rolls had been artificially expanded before polling. Gandhi alleged that the EC issues papers in a format that is not machine-readable, preventing the use of optical character recognition and making it impossible to extract the data through scanning.

“In the Mahadevapura assembly segment, the Congress received 1,15,586 votes, whereas the BJP garnered 2,29,632 votes. The Congress won all the Vidhan Sabhas except Mahadevapura, where the BJP swept and secured a victory margin of 1,14,046 votes. This seat significantly contributed to their election win, and the Lok Sabha result went in their favour on that seat,” he told the audience, which included journalists.

“This discrepancy is a huge imbalance. So, we started examining the details and discovered that approximately 1,00,250 votes were stolen in the Mahadevapura assembly,” he added.

According to the allegations, the “stolen” votes included 11,965 cases where the same voter appeared more than once on the rolls, 40,009 registrations tied to fake or invalid addresses, 10,452 voters listed as part of bulk registrations or all linked to a single address, 4,132 entries with invalid or mismatched photographs, and 33,692 instances where Form 6, meant for enrolling new voters, was misused.

Election officials reportedly responded by requesting sworn statements along with precise part and serial numbers before initiating any verification, in line with the legal and procedural rules that dictate how complaints about voter roll accuracy must be addressed and the process that must precede official action. The EC’s reply presented Gandhi’s allegations as though they were only a request to correct errors in the rolls. Gandhi, however, described the data as “evidence of crime.”

Addressing the EC, he said it had a responsibility to safeguard rather than damage Indian democracy, adding that the material presented amounted to proof of a constitutional offence. He asserted that the findings from a single Assembly constituency revealed a method he believed was being deployed on a large scale in multiple states across the country.

Gandhi’s claim is serious because electoral integrity, a core concept in political science, describes how far elections genuinely translate citizen preferences into political representation through processes that guarantee equal suffrage, transparent administration and impartial enforcement of rules. The principle of “one person, one vote” ensures that every eligible citizen’s ballot carries equal weight. Adding duplicate or fictitious voters to the rolls alters the makeup of the electorate, which can skew turnout figures, shift vote shares and influence victory margins.

If the allegations are proven, political accountability comes under strain because citizens lose the ability to use elections to assess leaders’ performance or to anticipate their future conduct. Political theory describes this as a decline in “retrospective accountability,” where voters assess leaders on their past performance, and in “prospective accountability,” where they assess them on their expected future conduct. This decline weakens elections’ ability to drive policy change or improve governance, reducing how effectively governments respond to citizens’ needs.

In a constitutional democracy, the Election Commission is meant to function as an independent body responsible for conducting elections, with its credibility resting on public confidence in its neutrality and its capacity to enforce the rules. This independence serves as a safeguard against those in power influencing the process.

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