Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday alleged large-scale rigging in the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections, also claiming that a Brazilian woman voted 22 times in 10 polling booths.

At a press conference in Delhi, Gandhi claimed that the names of about 25 lakh fake voters were added to the electoral rolls in Haryana ahead of the polls in October 2024.

The state has about two crore voters, which means one in every eight voters is fake, he added.

The Congress leader displayed a photograph of a woman, whom he claimed was a Brazilian model, alleging that her image was used in voter rolls of several constituencies.

“This is a centralised operation,” he claimed. “What is a Brazilian person doing on a voters’ list in Haryana?”

Gandhi claimed this was part of a wider conspiracy to “turn a Congress landslide victory into a loss”.

He said that of the 25.4 lakh fake entries the Congress had identified in Haryana’s voter list, 5.2 lakh were duplicate voters, 93,174 had invalid addresses and 19.2 lakh were bulk voters.

Gandhi said that details of the misuse of Form 6 (additions) and Form 7 (deletions) were not available with the Congress because the Election Commission had restricted access to the data after the party alleged voter manipulation in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in Karnataka.

The Election Commission has not commented on Gandhi’s allegations yet.

He also said that one voter’s name and photograph appeared 223 times in two polling booths in Haryana, alleging that there were “thousands and thousands of such examples” in the state.

Gandhi accused the Election Commission of helping the Bharatiya Janata Party by not removing the duplicate voters and covering up evidence by “destroying CCTV footage”.

“The Election Commission can remove duplicates within seconds,” he said. “All they need to do is run one query, identify the same photo, name or address. It is not being done. Why? Because they are helping the BJP.”

The Congress leader also claimed that several BJP members were registered as voters in more than one state.

“Thousands of BJP leaders are voting in both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana,” he alleged. “There are people who are BJP leaders in one state and voters in another.”

At the press conference, Gandhi showed a video of BJP’s Kerala Vice President B Gopalakrishnan, in which the BJP leader said that his party will relocate persons from other states to constituencies it intends to win.

In August, Gopalkrishnan had said: “In constituencies where we intend to win, we will bring people even from Jammu and Kashmir. We will settle them for a year and ensure they participate in the voting process. There is no doubt about it. We will do it again in the future.”

On Wednesday, Gandhi also claimed that the system of “vote theft” had been “industrialised”, alleging that similar manipulation would take place in the Bihar Assembly elections.

The first phase of the Bihar polls will take place on Thursday and the second phase on November 11. The counting of votes is scheduled for November 14.

He invited residents of Bihar’s Jamui district to the stage, who said that their names had been deleted from the electoral rolls.

The Congress leader alleged that, like them, several genuine voters were removed during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.

The exercise in Bihar was completed ahead of the Assembly polls. In the final electoral roll published on September 30, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded in the state.

Several petitions were filed against the voter roll revision in Bihar, raising concerns that the process could remove eligible voters from the list.

“You can ask why we did not detect [the errors] in the voter list, that’s because the voter list comes at the last minute,” Gandhi said.

Gandhi also questioned Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s claim that the use of “House Number 0” in voter records is meant for homeless persons.

The leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha alleged that the real reason the number is assigned is to make voters untraceable, accusing Kumar of “lying to the people of India”.

He said that this method makes voter verification impossible, adding that one such address listed 501 voters, but when checked, no one was actually living there.

On September 1, Gandhi had said that his party would release a “hydrogen bomb” of evidence about vote theft, adding that after the disclosure, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will “not be able to show his face to the country”.

Allegations a ‘well-planned conspiracy’, says BJP

BJP leader Kiren Rijiju said that Gandhi’s allegations about Haryana when the elections are taking place in Bihar showed that the “issue is being fabricated to divert attention” as the Opposition has “no issue left in Bihar”.

The BJP leader said that Gandhi was targeting the country’s system and the credibility of institutions.

“Questioning the Election Commission, our democratic system, and the credibility of the institutions means you’re targeting the country, our system,” he said. “This is a well-planned conspiracy.”

Rijiju said that Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini’s comment that the BJP will win the state polls because it as a “vyavastha”, or arrangement, in place, meant that the Hindutva party has the organisational structure and discipline to win elections.

The Union minister was referring to a video played by Gandhi during the press conference showing Saini making the assertion before the Assembly election result.

Also read: 5 key takeaways from Rahul Gandhi’s Haryana polls rigging allegations

Aland, Mahadevapura voter manipulation allegations

On September 18, Gandhi claimed that a centralised software programme was being used to systematically delete names from voter lists in Karnataka, and alleged that Chief Election Commissioner Kumar was protecting those committing “vote theft”.

The deletion process specifically targeted polling booths where the Congress was dominant, Gandhi alleged.

The Opposition leader said that the Congress’ analysis of the Aland Assembly constituency in Karnataka showed that an unknown entity had used software to delete voters in a centralised manner.

He alleged that these voter IDs were deleted with the help of fake login IDs and phone numbers from outside Karnataka.

While it was unclear how many voters were removed from the electoral rolls through the process in Aland, 6,018 applications had been filed impersonating other voters, the Opposition leader claimed.

The persons had never filed the applications, he added.

In response, the Election Commission said that the allegations made by Gandhi were “incorrect and baseless”.

The commission said that “no deletion of any vote can be done online by any member of the public, as misconceived by [Gandhi]”.

In 2023, “certain unsuccessful attempts were made for deletion of electors” in Aland and a first information report was filed by the Election Commission itself to investigate the matter, the poll panel said.

The Aland constituency was won by a BJP candidate in 2018 and by a Congress nominee in 2023, the poll panel added.

On August 7, Gandhi said that his party had spent six months examining the electoral rolls in Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency and found discrepancies in more than one lakh names.

The Congress leader claimed that the electoral rolls included 11,965 duplicate entries, 40,009 voters with fake or invalid addresses, 10,454 “bulk voters” registered in a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs and 33,692 voters in whose cases there had allegedly been misuse of Form 6.

The Election Commission’s Form 6 is an application document for registering new voters.

He alleged that this was evidence of the poll panel having colluded with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Election Commission had dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as “false and misleading”.

Election rigging claims

Gandhi and the Congress have also repeatedly alleged that there was “industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions” in the Maharashtra polls held in November.

The BJP-led alliance had defeated the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition, which includes the Congress, in the polls.

The Election Commission, however, has rejected these allegations. On August 14, it described Gandhi’s claims regarding Mahadevapura as “false and misleading”. Earlier, in February, it had called attempts to malign the Commission by parties disappointed with poll results “completely absurd”.

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