BENGALURU: A day after Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi claimed large-scale irregularities in voter rolls in Mahadevapura Assembly constituency, BJP leader and former Mahadevapura MLA Aravind Limbavali dismissed the allegations as baseless.
“He (Rahul) flagged voters with multiple addresses, but these people were given form number 7 (to delete their previous address and change to new) and we have the documents. In some cases people have given their complete addresses, but EPIC cards had zeroes in place of the address due to a printing error,’’ he told reporters on Friday.
Limbavali said Rahul alleged that there were 40,009 invalid votes, over 10,000 bulk votes, misuse of form 6 (new voters), close to 12,000 duplicate voters and 4,132 voter IDs without proper photo in Mahadevapura Assembly constituency. “We did a reality check and found that this is not true. For example, a voter who has four addresses has to delete his name from previous addresses. As this was not done, his name remained in four places. But he voted in only one place. A voter had registered his name in the voter list in Varanasi when he was 19 years old and later went to Mumbai and then shifted to Bengaluru. He had given form 7 (to delete his name from previous addresses), but this was not done.”
Limbavali explained that Mahadevapura constituency was carved out of Varthur constituency in 2008. “Since then, Lok Sabha polls and Assembly polls were conducted four times each and all of them were won by the BJP. Except in 2008 and 2009, the BJP had won the polls here with a lead of more than one lakh,’’ he said.
He said the number of voters increased since 2008 owing to the rapid influx of migrants.