'Vote chori': SIT fixes on 6 suspects paid Rs 80 per vote deletion in Karnataka

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing alleged 'vote chori (theft)' in Karnataka's Aland Assembly segment during the 2023 state Assembly elections has found evidence that attempts were made to illegally delete voters’ names from electoral rolls. Investigators have identified at least six suspects believed to have participated in the operation, which allegedly offered payments of Rs 80 for every deleted vote.

Senior officers in the Karnataka Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which is overseeing the probe, told PTI that nearly 6,994 deletion requests had been made in Aland ahead of the polls. While a handful were genuine, the vast majority were found to be bogus and targeted specific voter blocs known to support the Congress.

Aland, located in Kalaburagi district of north Karnataka — the home turf of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge — is represented by senior Congress leader B.R. Patil. It was Patil, along with Kharge’s son Priyank Kharge, who serves as Karnataka's IT and rural development minister, who first detected the suspicious voter-deletion activity and alerted the chief electoral officer (CEO) of Karnataka.

Patil alleged that nearly 7,000 names belonging mainly to Dalit and minority voters were marked for deletion. “These were Congress votes,” he said, adding that the deletions were halted only after the CEO intervened and ordered a status quo. “Had these votes been deleted, I would have surely lost the election,” Patil later told reporters. In the 2023 contest, he defeated BJP’s Subhash Guttedar by around 10,000 votes.

The controversy resurfaced last month when Rahul Gandhi, at a press conference in New Delhi on 18 September, accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of stalling the probe and “protecting those destroying Indian democracy”. Gandhi alleged that the CID had written to the ECI 18 times over 18 months seeking crucial digital data such as IP logs, OTP records and device identifiers used to access voter databases — but had either received no reply or incomplete information.

He described the alleged operation as part of a “centralised, tech-driven conspiracy” to remove opposition-leaning voters from rolls. “This is not just one constituency — this is a system, a machine, being used to delete votes,” Gandhi said, citing Aland as a “smoking gun” example.

Following Gandhi’s remarks, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah wrote to the ECI demanding that it hand over the technical data sought by investigators within a week. “The Election Commission must cooperate fully. Withholding essential evidence amounts to obstructing justice,” he said in Bengaluru.

The CID-led SIT, headed by additional director-general of police B.K. Singh, has since intensified its probe. “Attempts were indeed made in Aland to delete votes. We questioned about 30 people and of them, five to six are strong suspects. They can be arrested,” a senior official told PTI.

Investigators say the suspects were linked to a data centre in Kalaburagi, where operators allegedly used Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems to file mass deletion requests under forged credentials. The SIT believes these digital requests were routed through intermediary accounts, disguising their origins.

On the basis of these leads, the SIT carried out raids on properties connected to the suspects — including those linked to Guttedar, his sons Harshananda and Santosh, and their chartered accountant. During the operation, officers also found burnt voter-record papers near Guttedar’s residence.

Guttedar, however, dismissed the allegations as “politically motivated”. He told reporters that the burnt materials were “just household waste” cleared out during Diwali cleaning. “There was no malafide intention behind burning these documents. If we had ulterior motives, we would have done it somewhere away from our house,” he said.

Priyank Kharge reacted sharply to the SIT’s interim findings, writing on X: “Voters deleted for just Rs 80 in Aland. The latest findings from the Karnataka SIT confirm what we’ve been saying all along: over 6,000 genuine voters were struck off the rolls through a paid operation ahead of the 2023 elections.”

Kharge alleged that “a full-fledged data centre was operating out of Kalaburagi, where operators systematically deleted voters’ names and tampered with our democratic process.”

“All investigations now point to foul play by BJP leaders and their associates. Every dirty trick and modus operandi from the BJP’s #VoteChori playbook will be exposed piece by piece, and every single person responsible will be held accountable.”

The BJP has rejected the charges, insisting that the party or its leaders had “no role whatsoever” in the deletions. Guttedar claimed that his family was being “targeted out of political vendetta” after his narrow loss to the Congress candidate.

The Election Commission of India has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as “baseless and misconceived”. It said that no member of the public can delete a vote online, and that deletions follow a rigorous verification process under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. “In the Aland case, certain unsuccessful attempts were made for deletions of electors, for which an FIR was registered by the ECI itself in 2023,” the commission said in a statement.

According to the Indian Express, the ECI provided a partial data set in late 2023 but has yet to hand over dynamic IP address records, making it “almost impossible to geolocate the original sources” of the fraudulent deletion attempts. CID officials privately admit that the absence of such data has delayed their final report.

Preliminary findings indicate that of the 6,018 deletion requests received in Aland, only 24 were valid; the rest were rejected by the CEO as erroneous. Officials suspect that an organised network — possibly outsourced to data-entry operators — was behind the mass requests. Investigators are examining whether any local political offices or intermediaries financed the operation.

The SIT’s focus, according to officers, is now on tracing digital footprints that could connect the suspects’ systems to the ECI’s portal. The team is also analysing communications between user IDs, timestamps, and payment traces that may show coordination.

Senior officials said arrests could follow once corroborative data arrives. “We are confident of building a prosecutable case once we have the server-side logs and confirmation of device IDs,” one official said.

With PTI inputs