11 August 2025
India’s election commission is facing renewed scrutiny over discrepancies in voter lists and allegations of result tampering.
The latest row began last week after opposition leader Rahul Gandhi claimed that almost 100,000 listed voters in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura constituency were fake. The voter lists were replete with duplicate names, wrong addresses and blurred photos, he said, calling this a “theft” of the people’s mandate.
The election commission denied any wrongdoing. It, however, asked Mr Gandhi to submit a formal statement and provide evidence.
DK Shivakumar, deputy chief minister of Karnataka from Mr Gandhi’s Congress party, then filed a complaint to the poll body seeking a full audit of voters rolls.
He also asked the commission to provide voter data in a format that would allow checking it for possible manipulation.
Similar allegations were made in other states. In Uttar Pradesh, Congress chief Ajay Rai said that the ruling BJP had used fake voter entries and duplicate names to influence the 2024 parliamentary election in prime minister Narendra Modi’s Varanasi constituency.
In northern state of Haryana, Congress MP Deepender Hooda claimed the results had changed in the BJP’s favour after several rounds of the opposition leading.
These allegations mounted pressure on the election commission, which was already under scrutiny for controversially updating electoral rolls in Bihar ahead of the state election in November. The poll body removed 6.5 million names after Special Intensive Revision it said was aimed at eliminating dead, duplicate, or migrated voters.
But Mr Gandhi seized on the exercise to accuse the commission of aiding the BJP in “vote theft”, echoing opposition claims that the rushed process disproportionately targeted minority Muslim voters, typically considered to support non-BJP parties.
The commission claimed the Special Intensive Revision, a door-to-door verification drive conducted between 25 June and 26 July, had reached all 78.9 million registered voters in the eastern state. The exercise was the first extensive update since 2003 and was long overdue.
The commission says similar verification exercises will soon be launched across the country, covering close to a billion voters.
The preliminary rolls now list 72.4 million electors in Bihar, 6.5 million fewer than before. The commission claims to have removed 2.2 million to deceased voters, about 700,000 duplicate registrations and roughly 3.6 million people emigrants from the state.
The commission insists the revision was necessary and impartial but refuses to publish the list of deletions.
It has given voters until 1 September to seek corrections and, according to local media reports, more than 165,000 people have already submitted requests.
In several Bihar villages, the BBC found voters complaining the newly drafted electoral rolls were riddled with glaring errors, from photos of strangers appearing next to their names to images of women replacing male family members.
Some villagers discovered deceased relatives listed as active voters while others spotted the same person enrolled multiple times.
The Bihar revision is now at the centre of a wider political storm in India, amplified by Mr Gandhi accusing the election commission of enabling large-scale voter suppression.
Citing the deletions in Bihar and similar exercises in Karnataka, Mr Gandhi alleged the process was being manipulated to disenfranchise opposition-leaning communities, a charge the poll body strongly denied.
Fellow opposition parties in the INDIA bloc, led by Mr Gandhi’s Congress, echoed his charge, accusing the commission of working in the BJP’s interest ahead of a high-stakes state election.
The Congress launched a “Vote Chori”, meaning vote theft campaign, alleging electoral list manipulation in the 2024 parliamentary election, especially in the Bangalore Central constituency, and demanding greater transparency from the election commission.
“Vote chori is an attack on the foundational idea of ‘one man, one vote’. A clean voter roll is imperative for free and fair elections. Our demand from the EC is clear - be transparent and release digital voter rolls so that people and parties can audit them,” Mr Gandhi said.
The opposition leader alleged that over 100,000 fake votes in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura helped the BJP win the seat in last year’s parliamentary election. The BJP won the seat by 32,707 votes.
His party alleged similar voter roll anomalies in Bihar, including hundreds registered at single addresses.
Mr Gandhi called this a “huge criminal fraud”, accusing the BJP and the election commission of collusion.
The commission rejected Mr Gandhi’s allegations on X as “false and misleading”.
The poll body claimed that it was not sharing electoral rolls in machine-readable formats to safeguard privacy and comply with legal precedents.
The BJP dismissed the opposition campaign as pure theatre, with spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia saying the Congress party should pursue election petitions rather than float unsubstantiated accusations.
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