Grounds of Kamal Nath verdict the poll body cites in fight against Rahul Gandhi

New Indian Express

3 days ago

NEW DELHI: A day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of colluding with the ruling BJP for 'stealing' over one lakh votes in a seat during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka, the poll body alleged that he was re-cycling an old accusation that was thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2018.
Rahul explained that poll roll doctoring is essentially done in five ways — by enrolling duplicate voters, inserting fake and invalid addresses, bulk voters at one address, invalid photos, and the misuse of Form 6 that is used to add new voters. Similar allegations of inflating the voter list in Madhya Pradesh ahead of the 2018 assembly polls were made by the then state Congress president Kamal Nath.
In his petition before the Supreme Court, Kamal Nath cited data from a private website to allege a 40% jump in the number of voters in Madhya Pradesh in a decade. When those born in 1991-2001 and attained the age of 18 years between 2008-2018 are taken into account, the increase in the number of voters in the state as per the prevailing trend ought to have been 1,18,18,290. However, the actual jump in the total number of new voters during 2008-2018 was 1,45,13,404, which works out to over 40%. The addition of 26.95 lakh new votes in Madhya Pradesh was inconceivable, he argued.
Besides, as many as 36 voters had the same face in the poll rolls, Kamal Nath charged. Rahul similarly alleged that the name of Aditya Srivastava was present in the electoral rolls of three different states. But the ECI in its pushback said the error was rectified months ago.
Kamal Nath wrote to the ECI on June 3, 2018 pointing to the humongous errors in the voter list and demanding that it rectify them immediately. The poll body on July 16, 2018 wrote to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) stating that the allegations made by Kamal Nath were not substantiated. It, however, admitted that there were duplicate and fake entries, which had been weeded out. In the process, 24 lakh names were dropped from the voter list published in January 2018. It also admitted that 2,37,234 photo entries were suspicious/ unclear/ blank.
In his petition, Kamal Nath essentially sought two reliefs: (a) Directions for conducting random verification of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) for 10% of the votes; and (b) soft copies of the draft electoral rolls in text format to all political parties to let them use online tools to identify duplicate or fake voters.