The Congress on Saturday questioned the Election Commission after several discrepancies were flagged in the voters’ list of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council elections, where voters’ names such as "Ram ne Yadav ko maara", "Ram ne Sharma ko maara" and "B.Com" appeared in place of a voter's father's name in the voters’ list.
The poll body had on Friday clarified that the errors accounted for a very small proportion of the electorate and in several cases were linked to name translations by software introduced for online preparation of electoral rolls.
Congress MP Jairam Ramesh alleged that the Election Commission’s defence was an attempt to “deflect the blame for a premeditated conspiracy orchestrated to assist the BJP” onto a software and technical glitch, which he called “unacceptable”.
“Has the integrity of India's democracy and the voter list been left entirely to the mercy of software and ECINET? The responsibility lies with the Election Commission, not the software”, the Congress general secretary in charge of communications wrote on X.
Ramesh pointed out that the voter list for the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council election held on Friday contained “unusual” entries, including a voter named “Ram Ne Yadav Ko Mara” whose father was listed as “Murkh Chandra Yadav”, another voter whose father’s name was recorded as “B. Com”, and another whose name appeared as “Ram Ne Sharma Ka Naam”.
Uttar Pradesh chief electoral officer Navdeep Rinwa on Thursday had acknowledged the errors, saying 158 entries out of 14.81 lakh names across the electoral rolls for the 11 constituencies contained details that appeared "unusual".
The Congress MP questioned whether there was any guarantee that similar irregularities had not occurred in other elections when such “errors” surfaced in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council election. “There are only a few months left until the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, but these emerging cases raise serious questions about voters' rights and electoral transparency.”
He argued that the poll body’s response “reinforces” the questions previously raised by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi and the Opposition’s primary charge that the Election Commission was not being run according to the Constitution.
“It is the Election Commission's responsibility to keep voter lists free from all kinds of irregularities, so that no voter faces any difficulty in exercising their voting rights”, Ramesh said, upping his attack on the nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
“The very SIR, whose declared objective was to purify the voter lists, has instead cast doubts on their reliability. The suspicion in the minds of the country's people—that election theft occurred in the previous Lok Sabha elections and in states like Haryana, Maharashtra, West Bengal, etc.—is now turning into conviction.”
“We firmly believe that the BJP has won by colluding with the Election Commission to steal elections”, Ramesh added.
Ramesh cited Pilibhit to bolster his “vote chori” allegation, claiming that the details of 10,470 voters had been altered through Form 8 despite there being no supporting records to justify the changes.
“Most of the voters whose details were altered belong to a particular community, which the BJP has consistently persecuted. Such discrepancies raise suspicions of a conspiracy to deprive them of their voting rights at the time of polling”, the Congress leader said.
He also flagged several complaints of names going missing from the voter list issued after SIR and also people getting incorrect details when searching for online EPIC numbers.
Ramesh said the Election Commission had yet to provide the machine-readable data sought by the Congress and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, arguing that access to the complete data would enable a clearer investigation into the extent of irregularities in the voter list.
The Congress leader also accused PM Modi and the BJP of launching personal attacks on Rahul Gandhi, “instead of answering the real questions of the people”.
“The BJP should know that the country has recognised its petty tactics over the past twelve years. Now, this earthen pot will not boil again and again”, he said, reiterating the demand for chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s immediate resignation, and a halt to this “fake SIR process being run with the intent of benefiting the BJP.”