Biju Janata Dal (BJD) said on Monday (August 11, 2025) that it would knock the door of the Orissa High Court for the discrepancy in the 2024 assembly and Lok Sabha elections, as the Election Commission has failed to give a satisfactory answer to the party on the issue. BJD spokesperson Amar Patnaik, MLA Dhrub Charan Sahu and former MP Sharmishtha Sethi announced this at a press conference here.

Patnaik told reporters here, ‘About 8 months ago, BJD had handed over fact-based evidence to the Election Commission regarding the vote discrepancy seen in the previous elections and sought answers, but has not received a satisfactory reply yet. Therefore, BJD has decided to move to the High Court regarding this matter. However, the party has kept distance from the ‘vote theft’ demonstration of the Congress and the opposition coalition ‘India’.

Many discrepancies in data studies

Patnaik said, ‘Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has recently questioned the transparency of elections, after which the state unit of the party is also making it an issue. However, BJD raised this issue long ago. Rahul Gandhi also reiterated the audit system, which was demanded by BJD. The BJD spokesperson said that after the end of the last election, many discrepancies came to light after studying the data given by the Election Commission.

Patnaik said, ‘We mainly raised three issues. The first is that the number of votes counted in all parliamentary constituencies of the state was more than the number of votes cast in EVMs. The second is that there was a lot of difference between the total votes cast in the parliamentary constituencies and the total votes cast in the assembly constituencies, the voting took place simultaneously.

The number of votes cast after 5 pm is different

He said that the third issue was that after the election time ended at 5 pm during the polling days, the number of votes cast varied from about seven percent to 30 percent. The BJD spokesperson claimed that the difference was from 15 to 30 percent in 50 percent assembly seats.

He said that the BJD had filed a complaint with the Election Commission in this regard on December 19, 2024 and sought an answer. Apart from this, there was also a demand to audit the entire process from preparing voter list to make the election process more transparent.

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