Days after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi raised a sensational allegation of ‘vote theft’ in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura Assembly segment in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, election officials have begun on-ground inspections to verify the voter identity.
Although the Election Commission has yet to launch a formal investigation into Gandhi’s charges, reports stated that Booth Level Officers (BLOs) visited some of the places mentioned in his press conference on Friday.
Gandhi alleged there was a theft of 1,00,250 votes in the Mahadevapura segment, with 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single-address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.
He also mentioned a few house numbers bizarrely having a high number of registered voters. For instance, House No. 35 at Muni Reddy Garden on 5th Cross Road had reportedly 80 registered voters.
When the BLOs visited these places to verify voter identity and address, they found that some of the listed voters might have lived there once as tenants, but nobody was present at the time of inspection, according to a Deccan Herald report.
None of the 80 registered voters were living in House No. 35, which just has a kitchen, a hall and a toilet, the report said. Currently, a family from West Bengal is living in the house on rent.
"Some of the names found in the electoral roll may have lived in this place, but we had marked the names of missing voters as ‘residence shifted’. Chances are that all the 80 voters gave the same address for documentary proof while they lived in the shanties around this place,” The DH report quoted a BLO as saying.
Meanwhile, Jayaram Reddy, who reportedly rented about 30 houses in Muni Reddy Garden, said he had not given houses to any of the 80 voters mentioned in the electoral roll.
Mahadevapura falls under Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency.
At the press conference, Gandhi cited that in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP secured 6,58,915 votes in the Bangalore Central seat, winning with a margin of 32,707.
"In the Mahadevapura assembly segment, the Congress received 1,15,586 votes, whereas the BJP garnered 2,29,632 votes.
"The Congress won all the Vidhan Sabhas except Mahadevapura, where the BJP swept and secured a victory margin of 1,14,046 votes. This seat significantly contributed to their election win, and the Lok Sabha result went in their favour on that seat," he said.
