Chennai: Backing Congress leader and leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi’s allegations on ‘voter fraud’, Tamil Nadu chief minister and DMK president MK Stalin on Monday said that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has turned the Election Commission into its poll rigging machinery and that what had happened in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura, is not an administrative lapse but a calculated conspiracy to steal the people’s mandate.
On August 7 in New Delhi, Gandhi alleged that in Mahadevapura assembly constituency, 1,00,250 votes had been “stolen” through duplicate entries, fake addresses and bulk registrations at single locations. He accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of “choreographing” the elections to benefit the BJP.
The DMK’s principal ally in Tamil Nadu is the Congress. The “vote theft evidence presented by my brother” Rahul Gandhi exposes the scale of this fraud, Stalin said making three demands. He called for the immediate release of machine readable voter rolls for every state, an end to politically driven deletions, and an independent probe into the subversion of democracy. “DMK stands shoulder to shoulder in this fight. We will not watch in silence while the BJP robs India’s democracy in broad daylight,” Stalin said.
Karnataka deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar on Monday hit out at the Election Commission’s office after it issued a notice to Gandhi, asking him to submit supporting documents for his allegations of “vote theft.”
{{/usCountry}}Karnataka deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar on Monday hit out at the Election Commission’s office after it issued a notice to Gandhi, asking him to submit supporting documents for his allegations of “vote theft.”
{{/usCountry}}The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Karnataka issued a letter dated August 10, referring to Gandhi’s August 7 press conference. The CEO had pointed out that Gandhi had claimed to possess documents sourced from the Election Commission’s records, including a case where a voter named Shakun Rani allegedly voted twice, as shown in a tick-marked list presented by a polling officer.