NEW DELHI: Rejecting Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of voter list manipulation, the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Friday pointed out that the Congress-led Karnataka government itself is using the same electoral rolls for its caste census exercise. It dared him to sign a formal declaration for his claims or apologise to the nation.
Regardless of the format of the complaint, it’s the EC’s job to purify the rolls whenever discrepancies are pointed out.
ECI officials said Rahul was repeating a tired script. “In 2018, they (then MP Congress chief Kamal Nath) tried to mislead SC by producing documents from a private website to demonstrate that there are errors in the electoral rolls, saying same face was shown for 36 voters,” an official said.
“But, the defects had already been rectified four months before Nath made the allegations and a copy of revised rolls was supplied to the party. Yet, Nath sought the poll rolls in a searchable pdf format. The SC refused to entertain it, agreeing with the EC’s position that it would affect voter privacy.”
Can prove vote theft, says Rahul
Gandhi said if EC provides him 10 years of data, the voters’ list in machine-readable format and videos of polling stations, he can prove theft of voters in several Lok Sabha seats across the country.