New Delhi: A day before the first phase of polling in Bihar, Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday revived his charge of “vote chori”, this time accusing the Election Commission of India (ECI), “in partnership with the prime minister and the home minister”, of allowing the BJP to “steal” the 2024 Haryana assembly election.
Gandhi’s press conference at the Congress headquarters mirrored his previous two outbursts on the issue—first in August and then in September—in which he had made similar allegations against the ECI, citing data to claim that voter lists used in the Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Karnataka were compromised.
His assertion on Wednesday that the entire outcome of the Haryana assembly election—in which the BJP won a majority with 48 seats, denying the Congress a third consecutive victory—was rigged, marked a sharp escalation from his earlier allegations.
Citing an investigation conducted by his team, Gandhi alleged that as many as 25,41,144 entries in Haryana’s two-crore-strong voter list were fake. The Congress, he said, was denied victory through large-scale duplication of voters, registration under invalid addresses, and bulk entries for the same household.
“This means one in eight votes in Haryana was fake. Fake voters accounted for 12.5 percent of the electorate,” Gandhi claimed, adding that the findings had left him “shocked” and that he had asked his team to recheck the data multiple times to rule out any errors on their part. ThePrint breaks down the essence of Gandhi’s allegations.
Duplicate voters
In his presentation, Gandhi claimed that there were 5.2 lakh entries in Haryana’s rolls with the same name, relative’s name, and age within the same constituency. He also alleged that 1.2 lakh entries carried different names but the same photograph.
He cited, as an example, a stock image of a Brazilian model shot by photographer Matheus Ferrero that was allegedly used for 22 voters, named Seema, Sweety, Saraswati, and Suman, in the Rai constituency. “This means it was a centralised operation. Someone fed the photo into the voter list at the central level, not the booth level,” he said.
Gandhi also pointed to instances such as a woman’s photograph appearing 223 times across two booths in Mulana, and another woman’s image appearing 100 times across 10 booths in Tigaon. The Congress lost Rai to the BJP by 4,673 votes and finished third in Tigaon, behind the BJP and a rebel candidate.
“I want the young people of India, Gen Z, to understand this clearly, this is about your future being stolen. I am questioning the EC, I am questioning India’s democratic process, and I am doing it with 100 percent proof,” Gandhi said.
Invalid addresses
Gandhi further alleged that 93,714 registered voters in Haryana were listed with “invalid numbers like house number zero”, making on-ground verification impossible.
He said his team found one such voter living in a proper house, undermining Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s earlier statement that “house number zero” was used for homeless voters.
In August, Kumar had said: “There are many people who are homeless but are registered as voters. What should be their address? It’s marked where they sleep at night, sometimes on the road, sometimes under a bridge. Calling such people fake voters would be a big joke on our poor. Crores live in houses without numbers. Under EC rules, they are given the notional number zero while being fed into computers.”
Bulk voters
Gandhi also said his team found 19,26,351 bulk entries—instances where more than 20 voters were registered at the same house.
At Hodal, which the Congress lost to the BJP by 2,595 votes, Gandhi’s team allegedly found 66 voters registered at the residence of a BJP zila parishad vice-chairperson, and 501 voters at an address that could not be traced.
BJP-linked cross-voters between Uttar Pradesh & Haryana
Gandhi further claimed that thousands of voters were listed in both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, including two sarpanches from villages in Mathura district. In a statement, the Congress said that the presence of such entries served as proof of the system having been rigged by the BJP.
Mass deletions
The party claimed that as many as 3.5 lakh voters or nearly 2 percent of the electorate in Haryana were deleted between the 2024 Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections. Playing videos of their testimonies, Gandhi said, at a booth in Rai constituency, 128 people “mostly from communities that traditionally back the Congress”, and who had voted in the Lok Sabha, found their votes deleted before the assembly elections.
“We are informing the people of India that the prime minister and the home minister are not legitimately in government. The chief minister of Haryana is not legitimately in government. The same applies to Maharashtra. India’s Gen Z and youth have the power to restore democracy through Satya and Ahimsa (truth and non-violence) by peacefully expressing their desire and fighting for a democratic India,” Gandhi said.
He described “vote chori” as an industrialised process that could be replicated anywhere. “This is a systematic method evolved by the PM, BJP and EC to kill the Constitution and Indian democracy. It will be used in Bihar too, and I am confident that after the Bihar polls we will get the same records,” he said, hinting that the Opposition could face another electoral setback.
Accusing the ECI of colluding with the government, Gandhi said the poll body “in partnership with the PM and HM” had destroyed the country’s democratic foundations.
“The fundamental question is the integrity of the voter list. If that’s flawed, elections are flawed. There was no election in Haryana, it was a lie. This is a fundamental attack on the democratic soul of India, on Mahatma Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Sardar Patel by the RSS. Gandhi was murdered, and now his vision and ideas are being murdered,” he said.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: What we know about the Brazilian model Rahul Gandhi found on Haryana voter list