‘Vote chori’: Inside India’s voter list scandals | LME 87 | Pooja Prasanna
It’s been a week since Rahul Gandhi made allegations of ‘vote chori’, that’s stealing of votes, in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura,
The Election Commission of India has done nothing significant after the press meet.
Other than demand answers from Rahul Gandhi
And replace Bihar’s machine-readable list of voters online with scanned images- which are difficult to scrutinize.
Ever since that press meet, we have all been inundated with stories of fake voters and EPIC ID duplication from across the country- from Bihar, Kerala, Maharashtra and many other states.
Forget party lines or ideology: this is about the foundation of our democracy.
If our electoral rolls are compromised, it should matter to every single one of us.
Which is why, this week on Let Me Explain, we’re hitting the ground in two hotspots - Mahadevapura in Karnataka and Thrissur in Kerala.
To understand what exactly is going wrong and how
Many of you may be unaware, but there is a connection between The News Minute and the Mahadevapura example.
In 2022, we found that a private agency called Chilume had been employed by the Bengaluru municipal corporation and they were fraudulently collecting data and selling it to politicians. The intention was to eventually add and delete people from voters lists.
But after our investigation, the Election Commission of India stepped in and ordered revision of rolls in three places- Shivajinagar, Chikpet and Mahadevapura.
This was our big impact story but our work then stopped with finding what Chilume was upto.
A day after Rahul Gandhi’s press meet, a Congress leader told the Indian Express that it was the Chilume investigation that made them choose Mahadevapura as an example.
That investigation is an example of what small newsrooms can do.
So once again, let me remind you. Become a subscriber, become a part of our journey, help us do more investigations.
Rahul Gandhi was specific with his allegations.
That the Congress lost the Bangalore Central seat because of fake voters in Mahadevapura.
The Bangalore Central seat consists of 8 assembly segments- including Mahadevapura
In three segments- BJP lead in 2024 elections:
CV Raman Nagar
Gandhinagar
And Rajajinagar
The Congress lead in three- Shivajinagar, Shantinagar and Chamrajpet
In Sarvanganagar, which is the seventh assembly segment- congress had a massive lead.
The Congress’s contention is that with these seven segments they had a lead of 82000 votes.
But when Mahadevapura was counted- they lost the seat as BJP had a lead of 1,14,000 odd votes.
This assertion by the Congress is statistically tough to prove as Mahadevapura is a seat that BJP has won consistently.
But it doesn't invalidate Rahul Gandhi's claim
The voter list is compromised, and ground checks confirm it.
House no 791 in Chamundeshwari Layout has had three residents since 1991. Mala, her husband and son. But the small independent house address has 46 voters registered under its name.
Some reports say that a paying guest accommodation is also part of the same building and the 46 voters probably lived here before the pandemic.
Then there was 153 Bierre Street. This is a commercial building, a brewery in Whitefield where 68 voters are shown registered.
We spoke to the manager who did not want to speak on camera, but said he has not seen any of the registered voters. He called the owner from his phone, who said that he had bought the place 13 years ago, and since then he has not known anybody registering themselves as voters at that address.
At Muni Reddy layout - another place in Mahadevapura- 80 voters were registered to one building. But the house owner told Korah Abraham that though around the same number of migrant labourers live in the building, he doesn’t know any of the people on the voters list.
In all these three instances- even if we believe that migrant laborers who were living or working at these places had registered their votes, it is clear that none of them lived here after the pandemic. So why were the rolls not cleaned up?
How did the Election Commission fail to notice?
As I told you, after The News Minute’s investigation, a revision of the rolls in Mahadevapura was ordered towards the end of 2022.
Mahadevapura had 5,01,284 voters in 2019
In 2023 - it was 6 lakhs
And By 2024 it became 6.59 lakh voters. That’s a jump of 50,000 voters in a year.
The Election Commission’s handbook says that if the net addition of voters during a revision exceeds 4% over the previous roll- then there have to be more layers of cross-verification’.
Yes, Mahadevapura has a big migrant population- white-collar and blue-collar alike.
But this seat saw votes increase by 8.67% in just a year.
Did the election commission do more cross-verification?
We as citizens must ask this question. And if they did, how did places like Mala’s house or Biere Street slip right past their radar?
Now to the next problem. EPIC ids.
EPIC number is a 10-digit alphanumeric series allotted to a voter, and it's unique for every voter.
Rahul Gandhi highlighted three cases. Gurkirat Singh Dang, Aditya Srivastava and Shakun Rani.
A lot of media houses have done wrong fact checks to show that Aditya Srivastava is registered only in Karnataka
They were wrong because these journalists checked the wrong site.
We logged on to- https://voters.eci.gov.in/download-eroll?statecode=S25 and downloaded the electoral rolls.
Aditya is a registered voter in - Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra.
Shakun Rani has three EPIC ids and is registered in three booths in Mahadevapura.
Her husband Virendra kumar has votes in Karnataka, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh under three different EPIC ids.
The four EPIC numbers of Gurkirat are still on the ECI site.
That’s not all.
Look at this case— four versions of “Anitha” registered to the same address, all with different ID numbers and different relatives’ names.
A nun told us one Anitha lived there for six years, until June 2025.
The rest? She’d never heard of them.
Then at Reliance Fresh in Byrappa Layout, we found another triple entry.
The name “Syed Salahuddin” appears three times as a voter registered there.
But the store manager, Nagarjun, who’s worked there 15 years, says no one by that name has ever lived — or could live — in that commercial building.
We are not blaming individuals like Aditya, Shakun, Gurkirat or Virendra, they could have shifted places multiple times. But what was the Election commission doing?
In May 2025 - the Election Commission claimed that they have removed ALL duplicate EPIC ids. Even if we believed the ECI- what about this problem? One person registered under different EPIC ids. How does the commission plan to solve it? And who is using forms 6s to get people registered at multiple locations?
In mahadevapura, if migrant workers and commercial buildings have been used to increase registered voters, in Kerala’s Thrissur, this operation has been mainly targeted on apartments.
In 2024, actor Suresh Gopi won this seat. This was the first time the BJP won a Lok sabha seat in Kerala.
In Thrissur, vigilant Congress and CPI(M) cadres had registered many complaints over fake voters.
4c Apartment in Capital Village has 11 registered voters.
But only this woman called Prasanna Ashokan, is an actual resident.
One of the 10 fake voters was Ajayakumar, identified as Suresh Gopi’s driver
Thrissur saw the highest number of voter increase in Kerala. Between 2019 to 2024, there was an increase of almost 11%.
My colleague Haritha Manav traced many such cases where BJP supporters were registered in more than one constituency or they were completely fake. But like I said, many of these discrepancies were found before the election and these people probably did not cast their votes. But the question is- how many such fake votes have gone unnoticed? And were these votes cast?
Let’s now move on to the Special Intensive Revision or SIR process in Bihar.
It’s no secret that electoral rolls in India aren’t pure. This is why Bihar saw a SIR process in 2003 and now again in 2025 as people move in and out, many have died etc.
The Election Commission of India and the BJP have touted SIR as the solution to all problems.
In 2003, enumerators were sent for house-to-house verification.
In 2025, the rule changed. Every voter had to submit an enumeration form to their respective BLOs. They had to prove their vote. For those registered as of 2003, no extra documents were required.
Now one would think that after this Bihar rolls would have been cleaned up
Nope.
Our sister organisation Newslaundry’s Sumedha Mittal found that punctuation marks replaced names in a village in Bihar
She also found that almost 3 lakh voters had house number ‘0’ marked
Reporters Collective found that at least 5000 votes who are registered in Uttar Pradesh are registered in Bihar too
Mintu Paswan, a resident of Bihar’s Ara assembly constituency was declared dead by the Election Commission in the SIR process. He appeared before the Supreme Court.
Scroll found that EC had overnight replaced digital draft voter lists in Bihar with scanned images. This made investigative journalism or any scrutiny harder
There are many more such stories being uncovered by these responsible media houses.
These stories clearly show that a Special intensive revision done in a haphazard manner is not the solution.
And that brings us to the moot question.
Who is the Election Commission of India working for?
Article 324 of the Indian Constitution empowers the Election Commission to prepare electoral rolls and conduct elections.
This power includes an inherent duty to examine serious complaints about the integrity of electoral lists.
But if the very list of who can vote is broken, then the game is rigged before the first ballot is cast.
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