Police Claims to have Unearthed Evidence Supporting “Vote Chori” Allegation in Karnataka
Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Oct 23: The Karnataka police is believed to have unearthed some evidences in support of the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of “vote chori” and claimed to have detected a gang who worked for deleting names from voters’ list on payment.
Mr Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, had in mid-September, with slick PowerPoint presentations to back him up had talked about mass deletion of voters before the Karnataka Assembly elections in 2023 and the Parliamentary elections last year.
The Election Commission of India and the ruling BJP accused of ‘collusion to commit voter fraud – junked the claim and counter-claimed it to be a “baseless allegation.” However, nine weeks later, the Karnataka police claimed to have achieved a possible break in the case. Sources said it appeared a data entry team could have been paid money – a few lakh rupees in total – to delete a certain number of voters from the roll. At least six people were involved.
Sources said Rs 80 was paid for every successfully deleted voter, and that there were requests to delete nearly 7,000 voters from the rolls before the 2023 state election. A senior police official said “attempts were made in Aland to delete votes. We questioned about 30 people and, of them, five or six are strong suspects. They can be arrested.”
All six were associated with the data centre and made VoIP, (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls to delete voters. Raids on their homes and linked premises led to electronic devices being seized. These devices have been sent to forensic labs for data extraction.
Karnataka IT Minister Priyank Kharge reacted strongly to these reports, declaring on X, “The latest findings confirm what we’ve been saying all along… over 6,000 genuine voters were struck off the rolls through a paid operation ahead of the 2023 elections in Aland. A full-fledged data centre was operating out of Kalaburagi, where operators were systematically deleting voters’ names…”
But perhaps the big development was the discovery of burnt voter records, hundreds of them, near ex- BJP lawmaker Subhash Guttedar’s residence in the district last week. Guttedar claimed housekeeping staff incinerated ‘waste material’ and the burnt papers were not important. “There was no mala fide intention behind burning these documents. If we had ulterior motives, we would have done it somewhere away from our house,” the BJP leader said.
Aland is in Kalaburagi in northern Karnataka, and is the home turf of Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, as well as senior MLA BR Patil, who represents the constituency in the Assembly. ‘Vote chori’ red flags surfaced after Patil and Kharge’s son, Karnataka IT Minister Priyank Kharge, claimed proof of vote-deletion attempts, and wrote to the state’s Chief Electoral Officer.
Patil claimed fraud applications were filed to delete 6,994 votes from marginalised and oppressed communities, which traditionally vote for the Congress. Last month Rahul Gandhi – who has been taking the ‘vote chori’ row fight to the BJP ahead of the November election in Bihar – showed videos and offered data to back his claim.
One clip showed how, at 4 am on December 19, 2022, someone had opened, completed, and submitted forms to delete two names from the voter roll, all within 36 seconds. A day later the state’s Congress government formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe into the case.
