Voter list fraud: INC’s six months vs Election Commission’s six minutes

As if on cue, the chief electoral officer of Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh lost no time on Thursday, 7 August, 2025 to debunk the voter list fraud that Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, demonstrated before the media. Within minutes of the presentation by the LOP, the Karnataka CEO posted a letter on X, daring Rahul Gandhi to repeat the allegations on oath by the same evening or face punitive, legal action.

The CEO of Uttar Pradesh too took little time in claiming that the name of a voter, Aditya Srivastava, was not found in the electoral list in Lucknow contrary to Rahul Gandhi’s claim that the same voter had figured in the electoral rolls of Karnataka, Maharashtra as well as Uttar Pradesh.

It was left to Supreme Court lawyer Kapil Sibal and Congress MP Sasikanth Senthil, among others, to remind the Election Commission that Rule 20 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 (under which the LOP was asked to file a statement on oath) applies only when someone files a claim during the draft roll stage—before the final electoral roll is published. “There is no draft list. There is no Form 6 or 7 claim. Yet you want @RahulGandhi to file an oath? On what legal basis?” asked Senthil in a post on X.

Hours later fact checker Mohammad Zubair, one of the founders of AltNews fact-checked the Uttar Pradesh CEO. “Many BJP IT cell members are referring to @aajtak fact check which claimed that they did a "voter search" in ECI website and it didn't match Rahul Gandhi's claim. So, they concluded that the data provided by Rahul Gandhi is wrong. Let me share the full screen recording of the ECI website I did to verify @RahulGandhi's claim.”

“First searched for Aditya Srivastava's name in the list shared by ECI on its website.

1. Lucknow East, Part number: 84, Sl no. 630, EPIC number: FPP6437040.

2. Mumbai Suburban, Jogeshwari East (Maharashtra). Found his name in Part no: 197, Sl no. 877 with the same EPIC number: FPP6437040

3. Next searched for his name in Karnataka, Mahadevpura, Part no: 458, Sl no. 1265, with the same EPIC number: FPP6437040.

4. Next searched for his name in Karnataka, Mahadevpura, Part no: 459, Sl no. 678, with the same EPIC number: FPP6437040

Thus, the same voter, with the name EPIC number and other details does seem to figure in the electoral rolls in three different states and in two booths of the same constituency in Karnataka’s Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.

The ECI has the capacity to detect such duplication seamlessly through the ERONET, the Election Commission’s standardised processing system. Why wasn’t it detected is the question that the ECI needs to answer.

Another member of the AltNews team took to X to point out that LOP Rahul Gandhi had shown a screenshot of the electoral roll on the ECI website on 16 March, 2025. The Uttar Pradesh CEO, however, claimed that the electoral roll on the ECI’s website on 7 August, 2025 the name of Aditya Srivastava (FPP 6437040) was not found.

AltNews however downloaded the Final Roll-2025 from the ECI website on 7 January, 2025 and found Aditya Srivastava did figure on the electoral roll of Uttar Pradesh.  Is he a genuine voter, a fake voter or a political worker? This part of the jigsaw puzzle remains to be fixed.

The LOP alleged at the press conference that the Election Commission deliberately does not give political parties ‘machine readable’ electronic data on voter lists as it does not want them to scrutinise the document carefully.

“If the Election Commission had given us electronic data, it would have taken only 30 seconds instead of six months,” he had stated. He also stated that the paper on which the ECI does share the electoral rolls do not support optical character recognition, which would have allowed for data to be extracted by scanning them.