Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused the Election Commission of colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party in “destroying the election system”.

He alleged that in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura Assembly constituency alone, there were discrepancies in 1,00,250 names in the electoral roll.

Gandhi alleged that out of these, there were 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 voters with fake or invalid addresses, 10,454 “bulk voters” registered in a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs and 33,692 voters in whose cases there had allegedly been misuse of Form 6.

The Election Commission’s Form 6 is an application document for registering new voters.

Mahadevapura is part of the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency, which the BJP’s PC Mohan won in the general election last year.

Gandhi alleged that the Election Commission deliberately does not give political parties electronic data on voter lists as it does not want them to scrutinise the document carefully.

He claimed that it took the Congress six months to identify discrepancies in the voter list of just the Mahadevapura Assembly segment. “If the Election Commission had given us electronic data, it would have taken only 30 seconds,” he remarked.

The leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said that the papers also do not support optical character recognition, which would have allowed for data to be extracted by scanning them.

Gandhi said that in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the BJP won 25 seats with a margin of less than 33,000 votes.

“Narendra Modi is the prime minister because of a mere 25 seats,” he said. “The Election Commission is not giving us the data because if we replicate the analysis that we did in Mahadevapura in other places, the truth about democracy will become apparent.”

The Congress leader urged the Election Commission to come out with information about the alleged voter fraud, failing which there would be “consequences” for the polling officers involved.

“When the Opposition comes to power, you will face the repercussions of your actions, because you are attacking the foundation of what our freedom fighters built,” he said. “We will not allow you to do so, no matter who you are.”

The Election Commission has not yet commented on Gandhi’s allegations.

However, the Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka asked Gandhi to send the names of electors who had been allegedly wrongly included or excluded “so that necessary proceedings can be initiated”, PTI reported.

The chief electoral officer also asked Gandhi to sign an oath for each such name, adding that making false declarations was punishable under the Representation of Peoples Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

In response, Gandhi said that the Election Commission had not denied his claims.

“They haven’t said that the voter lists that Rahul Gandhi is talking about are wrong,” the Congress leader said. “Why don’t you say they’re wrong? Because you know the truth.”

On Saturday, Gandhi had said that his party suspects that the results of 70 to 100 seats in the 2024 general election were manipulated, claiming that “the election system in India is already dead”.

In the Lok Sabha polls last year, the BJP won 240 seats, down from 303 in 2019. Falling short of the 272-seat majority mark, it relied on coalition partners in the National Democratic Alliance to form the government. The Congress won 99 seats.

Gandhi had said on Saturday that his party had “100% proof” to support its claims.

The Election Commission had dismissed the allegations as “baseless” at the time. The poll panel had said that the Congress leader was repeatedly making “unsubstantiated and misleading” accusations aimed at discrediting its “impartial” work.

Gandhi and the Congress have also repeatedly alleged that there was “industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions” in the Maharashtra polls held in November. The BJP-led alliance had defeated the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition, which includes the Congress, in the polls.

In February, the Congress had urged the Election Commission to explain how the number of registered voters (9.7 crore) for the Maharashtra polls was more than the adult population of the state (9.5 crore).

The Election Commission had said at the time that attempts to defame it by parties that got an unfavourable verdict from voters were “completely absurd”.

On July 23, Gandhi claimed that the Congress had “caught a huge theft” in Karnataka, which he will show in “black and white” to the Election Commission.