‘Submit Proof’: Poll Body’s Sharp Letter to Rahul Gandhi Over Karnataka Voter Fraud Charge

The Election Commission has formally asked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to submit documentary evidence to back his explosive allegation that a voter cast her ballot twice in the recent Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka. The state’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) wrote to Gandhi following his press conference where he accused the poll body of colluding with the BJP to “steal elections,” a charge the commission has vehemently denied.

The controversy centers on a specific claim made by Gandhi regarding a voter named Shakun Rani. He had presented a document, which he claimed was “EC data,” alleging she had voted twice. “This ID has been used to vote twice, the tick marks were made by polling booth officer,” Gandhi had stated.

However, in a letter to the Congress leader, the Karnataka CEO countered that a preliminary inquiry found Shakun Rani had voted only once and that the document displayed by Gandhi was not issued by a polling officer. “You are kindly requested to provide the relevant documents on the basis of which you have concluded that Shakun Rani or anyone else has voted twice, so that a detailed enquiry can be conducted,” the letter stated.

This specific demand for proof comes in the wake of a broader attack launched by Gandhi, who as Leader of the Opposition, alleged a “massive theft” of votes in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly segment. He claimed that Congress’s internal research uncovered over one lakh fraudulent votes in the constituency, including thousands of duplicate voters, names with fake addresses, and invalid photos.

He attributed the party’s narrow loss in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat—where BJP’s P.C. Mohan won by just 32,707 votes—to this alleged “vote theft” in Mahadevapura, a segment Congress lost by a huge margin.

Gandhi also criticized the Election Commission for not providing machine-readable voter lists, arguing that the fraud could have been detected in “30 seconds” with proper data, and accused the body of deliberately supplying “non-machine-readable papers” to hinder scrutiny. The poll body has dismissed the allegations as “baseless accusations,” urging Gandhi to either submit a signed affidavit with his evidence or stop making such claims.