Congress leader Rahul Gandhi held a press conference on Thursday and made allegations of theft of vote in the Lok Sabha elections. He claimed that 1,00,250 fake votes are connected in the Mahadevpura Assembly of Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat. Rahul said that this data has been extracted from a pile of 7 feet high documents given by the Election Commission to the Congress. He described these documents as ‘criminal evidence’.

Examples of duplicate voters
First example: Voters named Gurkirat Singh Sikh are registered at four different booths (116, 124, 125, 126). Second example: The entry of a person named Aditya Srivastava was found in the voter list of three states – Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

Fake and invalid addresses
Rahul Gandhi claimed that the addresses of many voters are either shown zero (0), or are completely unclear. For example, someone’s father’s name is written “ILSDFHUG”, and someone’s “dfoigaidf”. He said, there are 40,000 such voters whose addresses are either wrong, unmatched, or cannot be verified.

Hundreds of voters at the same address
The Congress presented pictures of two rooms, one of which has 80 voters in the room and 46 voters in the other. Rahul questioned whether so many people can live in the same small room?

Wrong photo and dual entry
Some voter list does not have either photo or the photo is so small that it is difficult to identify. In one example, the woman named ‘Shakun Rani’ was named twice in the voter list – once the name and title in separate columns and the second time the full name together.

Election Commission’s response
The Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer has sought a formal announcement and affidavit from Rahul Gandhi, which includes the names of the voters who have been allegedly added to the list. The Election Commission clarified that the election results can be challenged only by filing a petition before the High Court.

Punishment for giving false evidence
The Election Commission warned Rahul that action can be taken under Section 227 of the Indian Penal Code (BNS) and Section 31 of the Public Representation Act of 1950 if given false evidence.

Rahul Gandhi’s retaliation
Rahul Gandhi said in response- ‘I am saying all this publicly. Consider it my oath. This data belongs to the Election Commission, not ours. They are not denying this data. He told ANI – ‘If this is wrong then why does the commission not say that the voter list is false? Because they know that we know the truth and they have done this across the country.