Just days to go for assembly elections in Bihar, Rahul Gandhi came up with another attack on the Election Commission today in his ‘vote chori’ allegations. In a press conference held at Congress headquarters in New Delhi, the Congress leader flagged the issue of same voter appearing in multiple voter lists. However, in doing so, he actually supported the ongoing efforts to clean up the electoral rolls, which aims to remove such duplicate entries.
Rahul Gandhi presented some examples of such same duplicate and doubtful entries in the voter list for Haryana. In one example, the photo of a female Brazilian model named Matheus Fferrero has been used to register 22 times, under different names in different places. Rahul Gandhi said that her photo appears for 25 voters in 10 booths, and ‘that means that it is a centralised operation’, and claimed that this is one of 25 lakh such examples.
As per Rahul Gandhi, there are 25 lakh ‘vote chori’, in Haryana, which includes 5,21,619 duplicate voters, 93,174 invalid addresses and 19,26,351 bulk voters. He claimed 25 lakh ‘confirmed vote chori’ means 12.5% in 2 crore voters in Haryana.
As per Congress, if a large number voters share the same address, it is listed by them as ‘bulk voters’. Earlier, ECI had clarified that when people live in rented houses, such cases may emerge, as people may not change the address after moving out.
Rahul Gandhi gave several more examples same photo used for multiple voters. However, all those voters have different names, ages and addresses.
In his press conference, Rahul Gandhi established that there are serious anomalies in the voter lists. While multiple voters have same photos, they may or may not mean ‘duplicate’ or ‘fake’ entries as claimed by him. It could be wrong photo updated by EC officials for genuine voters.
Rahul Gandhi claims EC should delete all voters having the same photo in just 2 minutes as it has software to do so. But that is not possible, as it could be a matter of genuine voter with wrong photos. If all such voters are removed, genuine voters also can get removed from the roll. To clean up the electoral rolls properly, an extensive review of the rolls is required. ECI needs to contact all such voters, and update their photos if they are genuine voters, or remove the names if they are found to be duplicate/fake.
That is exactly what the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), completed in Bihar and ongoing in several other states, intends to achieve. Due to historical reasons, lots of discrepancies have appeared in voter lists. To remove such discrepancies, the Election Commission conducts voter list revisions before every election, and Special Intensive Revisions after longer durations.
As part of that exercise, EC has started the SIR exercise for the entire nation, and that is being vehemently opposed by the INDI Alliance parties including Congress.
But by pointing out the anomalies in the voter lists, Rahul Gandhi has made a strong case for SIR.
