The Election Commission on Wednesday responded to the ‘vote theft’ claims of Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi by releasing a list of ‘important facts’ for the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections on social media.
This comes after Rahul Gandhi alleged that the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections were rigged in favor of the BJP. He claimed that 25 lakh votes were stolen in Haryana by adding 5.21 lakh duplicate voters, 93,174 illegal voters and 19.26 lakh bulk voters.
However, without mentioning Rahul Gandhi or his claims, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Haryana released a fact list for the elections and wrote: “Some important facts regarding Haryana Assembly Elections 2024.”
According to the fact list, only 23 election petitions were filed to challenge the elections, while the number of objections raised by the counting agents of all the candidates totaled 10,180.
Citing Haryana’s electoral list, Gandhi claimed that there were 25,41,144 fake voters with multiple instances of duplicate voters, illegal addresses and bulk voters. However, the Haryana CEO said that they received only 4,16,408 objections during the Special Summary Revision (SSR).
An Election Commission source also told news agency PTI that Gandhi’s allegation of vote rigging is baseless and no appeal has been filed against the voter list in Haryana.
“Why was no claim or objection raised by the Congress BLA during the amendment to avoid multiple names?” The source said.
Booth-level agents or BLAs are appointed by political parties to monitor voting and flag irregularities if any.
What did Rahul Gandhi claim?
Rahul Gandhi cited data from Haryana’s electoral list to claim that 25 lakh entries were “fake” and that last year’s assembly elections were “stolen”, as he accused the Election Commission of colluding with the BJP to make him win.
The leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha said that he is raising questions on the Election Commission and the democratic process in the country and hence, is doing so with 100 per cent evidence.
Gandhi alleged that the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and two election commissioners colluded with the BJP to ensure its victory in Haryana and claimed that “they are in partnership with Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.
The former party president alleged that ‘Operation Sarkar Chori’ was launched to convert Congress’ massive victory in Haryana into defeat.
He also alleged that CEC Gyanesh Kumar is “lying” to the people of India when he said that house number zero is given to homeless people, and this is the reality of houses with number zero.
