New Delhi, Jun 25 (PTI) The Congress on Wednesday urged the Election Commission to provide machine-readable digital copy of the Maharashtra voter lists along with video footage of polling day of the state and Haryana within a week.
The demand came days after the Election Commission’s offer to Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi to meet and discuss issues raised by him regarding the 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha election.
The Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts (EAGLE) grouping of the Congress, in a letter to the Election Commission (EC), said the party leadership will be happy to meet it soon after they receive the voter lists and the video footage so that they can also present the findings of their analysis.
“We request you to provide us the machine-readable, digital copy of the Maharashtra voter lists and video footage of polling day of Maharashtra and Haryana within a week from the date of this letter. This has been a long-standing request which should be easy to comply for the EC,” the EAGLE grouping said in a statement.
It said as the party that helped establish India as a sovereign democratic independent republic, they will cooperate with the EC to help strengthen the electoral processes.
“Similarly, it is in the interest of India’s global standing as a cherished democracy that the EC wins the fullest trust and confidence of India’s billion voters and its political parties,” the leaders said.
In response to the EC’s June 12 letter, the group wrote back to Ashwani Kumar Mohal, Secretary in the Election Commission of India, and said they have been highlighting the issues through letters, petitions, articles, press conferences and speeches in Parliament by the leaders of the INDIA bloc parties since December 2024.
“We have put forth very factual issues concerning the sudden, huge increase in electors and voters for the 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha election and the inexplicable upsurge in polling after 5 pm on election day,” they said.
The EAGLE grouping said it is irrefutable from the EC’s data that there were more new electors added between the Lok Sabha election held in May, 2024 in Maharashtra and the Vidhan Sabha elections held in November same year in the state than there were in the prior five years between the 2019 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections and the 2024 parliamentary elections.
“This has never happened before and defies basic common sense and logic. Who are these new voters and where did they emerge from?” they asked.
To investigate this thoroughly, the EAGLE said, any rational person would agree that the starting step was to compare the final electors list for the 2024 Maharashtra Lok Sabha elections and the final electors list for the 2024 assembly elections in the state.
“It is intriguing and puzzling that except to provide these two voter lists, the Election Commission has engaged in all other sorts of responses, media leaks, and calumny. Why don’t you just give us the final voter lists as requested? “Since you have evaded this for so long, we must ask the logical follow-up question – do you or do you not have these voter lists? In this context, not providing video footage of polling day raises further doubts and suspicion,” the EAGLE said.
The grouping said it is neither helpful nor productive to deflect from their simple and straight-forward requests with long-winded responses of the process of addition or deletion of voters or blaming a political party’s organisational functioning or claiming these voter lists were given to individual candidates and so on, the leaders said.
The EC formally responded to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of rigging in the 2024 Maharashtra polls, saying all elections are held strictly according to laws and candidates have presumably already moved the court with issues about poll conduct.
The poll panel said if the Congress leader still had any issues, he was welcome to write to the authority and the EC was also willing to meet him in person to discuss all issues.
Gandhi had alleged “match-fixing” in the Maharashtra polls in an article published in a leading daily. In response to the article, the EC sent an email to him on June 12, stating that the entire election process was conducted in a decentralised manner at the assembly constituency level. PTI SKC SKC KSS KSS
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