Liberia had only 15,000 voters, yet Charles King won the 1928 presidential poll by 60,000 votes. A mob burnt the ballots in Papua New Guinea’s Enga province in 2002. Officials counted the votes from the charred remains (don’t ask me how; ask those who counted Rs15 crore in burnt notes in Justice Yashwant Varma’s house), and found two lakh more ballots than registered voters.
We read these in trivia books (my bedtime reading) and laugh. Soon India may figure in them to make a chapter of laughs—that is, if Rahul Gandhi’s charges are true.
Rahul had been alleging vote fraud. Sour grapes, we thought. With a poll body that had built up a shining reputation, we thought it “more likely to see someone fatally struck by lightning than witness a case of in-person voter fraud”, as Tom Perez said. Now, if Rahul is right, we’ve been struck by lightning and hit by atom bomb.
Rahul had been intrigued by three things—his Congress losing states and seats where it had done well in the previous round, a freak rise in voter numbers in some seats, and reports of hordes of voters appearing in several booths minutes before the closing time of polling.
Three things made him smell rats. One, the commission was delaying giving out final voting figures. Two, when asked for digital voter lists wherein one could find a name by typing it and giving a search command, the commission gave him non-searchable versions. That much for digital India. Three, when asked for CCTV footage from the booths, the commission said those had been destroyed after 45 days of counting.
A frustrated Congress took up Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat as a test case. For two reasons. One, the number of voters there had grown by 140 per cent from 2008 to 2024, whereas the other seven segments had a growth of only three to 27 per cent. Two, the BJP had scored a surprise surge there when most other segments had expectedly gone to the Congress. The majority in Mahadevapura was enough for the BJP to offset the setbacks in the other segments and win Bengaluru Central by 32,000 votes.
Manual search by 60 Congress nerds in six months found 11,965 voters had been listed more than once in different booths, 40,009 had fake parentage and addresses (s/o Dfojgaidf, house number zero), 10,452 were staying in single addresses (80 souls in a one-room home), 4,132 with fake or no photos, and 33,692 elders registered as ‘new voters’.
Shocking! Yet, we would have dismissed these as a bad loser’s brawl with the umpire, but for the umpire’s conduct. We had thought the umpire would give a cautious response a day or so later, such as…. ‘the Election Commission has taken note of certain points raised by the hon’ble leader of the opposition… The commission will discuss these and come out with a response in due course’. Bureaucratic, but dignified.
Not this time! Even before Rahul had concluded his presser, commission officials were challenging him to come on oath, as if he were making a post-poll complaint. Suddenly, the umpire became a player.
Indeed, the rule is that election complaints have to be filed in 45 days after results. But how could one have, if it took 60 nerds six months to find out about voter fraud in one assembly segment?
Rahul may still be wrong, and the poll body right. Rahul is a politician, trusted by some, distrusted by more. We can vote him into the house or vote him out to hell.
The commission is a constitutional body, trusted by all, distrusted by none. We can’t vote it in or out. It has to stay above reproach.
prasannan@theweek.in