Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday urged the Karnataka government to investigate the alleged voter fraud in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency, the Deccan Herald reported.

This came a day after Gandhi said that his party had spent six months examining the electoral rolls in the Assembly constituency in central Bengaluru and found discrepancies in 1,00,250 names.

He alleged that this was evidence of the Election Commission having colluded with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Gandhi claimed that the electoral rolls included 11,965 duplicate entries, 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. The Bengaluru Central constituency has eight Assembly segments.

“The Karnataka government must investigate this crime and take action,” the newspaper quoted Gandhi as saying at a protest rally in Bengaluru on Friday. “Election Commission officers who added thousands of fake people into the voter list must be questioned and bring out the truth of Mahadevapura.”

Karnataka has a Congress government since May 2023.

He claimed that more than one seat in Karnataka had been “stolen”, adding that the Congress should have won 15 to 16 seats in the state in the Lok Sabha elections but secured only nine.

Gandhi also reiterated his demand that the Election Commission release machine-readable voter rolls and videography records of elections from the past 10 years.

“If we get electronic data, we will prove [Narendra Modi] became India’s prime minister by stealing votes,” he said. “The [Election Commission] must immediately hand over data to us.”

The Congress leader also claimed that Modi became a “prime minister with a margin of just 25 seats”, adding that the BJP won by just 34,000 votes in those constituencies.

The Election Commission has not yet responded to Gandhi’s allegations made during his press conference on Thursday.

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

The chief electoral officer had 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.

Congress’ allegations

On August 2, Gandhi had said that his party suspected 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 election 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.

On August 2, Gandhi had said 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 would show in “black and white” to the Election Commission.