"CEC is protecting vote chor, 6000 votes deleted", says Rahul in latest salvo

In a powerful and direct attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Election Commission (EC), Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday presented a detailed case of alleged "systemic voter manipulation," citing the Aland constituency in Karnataka as a prime example. At a press conference in Delhi, Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, used a sophisticated presentation to back his claims, alleging that a concerted effort was underway to delete names from electoral rolls through a highly coordinated and automated process. He specifically alleged that minority voters were being targeted in this scheme.

Gandhi's presentation focused on the case of Aland, where he claimed that someone attempted to illegally delete 6,018 votes. He noted that the actual number of deleted votes in the 2023 election was likely much higher, but this specific instance was "caught by coincidence." He described how the alleged tampering was discovered by a booth-level officer after she noticed her uncle's name had been removed from the electoral rolls.

The investigation led her to a neighbor who was listed as the applicant for the deletion. However, the neighbor denied any knowledge of the application, suggesting that a "centralised" and external force was behind the act. Gandhi elaborated on this, explaining that the operation was not a simple human error but a large-scale, automated program. He alleged that a software program was used to select the first voter on the list as the applicant and then used mobile numbers from outside the state to file the applications, making the operation difficult to trace at a local level.

Gandhi charged that this was a planned operation specifically targeting Congress strongholds. He provided data showing that the top 10 booths with the most deletions were all areas where the Congress had won eight out of ten seats in the 2018 election. He asserted that this was not a coincidence but a deliberate strategy to undermine the Congress party's support base.

Stepping up his attack, the Congress MP directly accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of protecting "vote thieves." "I am not saying this lightly, but as the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha," Gandhi stated, "The Chief Election Commissioner of India is protecting vote thieves. This is black and white evidence; there is no confusion in this." He claimed that the Election Commission has ignored repeated requests from investigators in Karnataka for digital leads that could expose the origin of the operation.