Bogus voting turned BJP into Bradman: Rahul Gandhi

In a scathing op-ed article in the Indian Express, Rahul Gandhi has questioned the impartiality and independence of the Election Commission of India. He began by pointing out that he had raised doubts about the fairness of elections often enough but “not every time and not everywhere”. The Vidhan Sabha elections in Maharashtra, however, were so glaringly rigged that the Election Commission of India failed to clear doubts raised by the Opposition and responded either with silence or aggression.

The Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition writes that after the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections, the Union government in consultation with ECI changed the conduct of election rules with retrospective effect by restricting access to CCTV footage from polling booths. This after a high court order directing the ECI to provide such footage to candidates who ask for them.

The LoP spelled out the four-step process that the government initiated to rig the polls:

1. Step one was to rig the panel selecting the umpires by ensuring that the prime minister and the home minister together appoint the election commissioners and outvote the third member of the collegium, the LoP

2. Step two was to inflate the number of voters in the electoral rolls. In the Maharashtra Lok Sabha elections in May 2024, the number of registered voters was pegged at 9.29 crore. Five months later in the Vidhan Sabha polls, the number swelled to 9.70 crore, though the government’s estimate of the state’s adult population was 9.54 crore. The number had increased by 31 lakh between 2019 Vidhan Sabha polls and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. In the next five months, the number went up by 41 lakh

3. The third step was to inflate the voter turnout on polling day. While the polling percentage at close of polling (5.00 pm) was 58.22, it kept increasing until the next morning, when the percentage was declared to be 66.05

The 7.83 per cent increase between 5.00 pm on polling day and the final polling figure in 2024 was way higher than the increase of 0.50 per cent in 2009, 1.08 per cent in 2014 and 0.64 per cent in 2019.

4. The final step was to ensure ‘targeted bogus voting’ in the 85 assembly segments where the BJP had fared poorly in the Lok Sabha elections. Consequently, most of the inflated polling was confined to 12,000 polling booths out of the 1 lakh-odd booths in the state. (76 lakh voters who, according to the ECI, cast their votes after 5.00 pm, would have required 10 hours to cast votes if each one had taken a minute. However, polling in most cases had ended before or around midnight).

The Election Commission, the LoP notes, had welcomed the trend of new and young voters casting their votes. He wondered why the ‘welcome trend’ was confined to only 12,000 booths.