E-Paper
Congress seeks copies of voter lists, meeting to discuss Maharashtra poll issues
The Congress’s EAGLE cell, set up to monitor the conduct of free and fair elections, wrote a letter to the ECI, asking for digital, machine-readable copies of two electoral lists for comparison
The Congress on Thursday sought machine-readable digital copies of the Maharashtra voter lists, polling day footage of the 2024 assembly election, and a meeting with the Election Commission of India (ECI) to discuss the issues Rahul Gandhi has raised about alleged rigging in the state.
The Congress’s EAGLE cell, set up to monitor the conduct of free and fair elections, wrote a letter to the ECI, maintaining it is irrefutable from its data that more new electors were added in Maharashtra between the Lok Sabha election in May 2024 and the assembly polls in November that year than in five years between 2019 state elections and 2024 national elections. “This has never happened before and defies basic common sense and logic.”
The cell questioned who these new voters were and where they emerged from. “To investigate this thoroughly...compare the final electors list for Maharashtra 2024 Lok Sabha elections and final electors list for Maharashtra 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections.”
It added that this is precisely what the Congress and Gandhi have been asking for seven months - a digital, machine-readable copy of these two electoral lists for a comparison. The cell wrote to the ECI in response to its letter to Gandhi.
The Congress, which offered to meet and discuss the issues about the 2024 Maharashtra assembly election, called it intriguing and puzzling that, except for providing two voter lists, the ECI has engaged in all other sorts of responses, media leaks, and calumny. “Why don’t you just give us the final voter lists as requested? Since you have evaded this for so long, we must ask the logical follow-up question: Do you or do you not have these voter lists? In this context, not providing video footage of polling day raises further doubts and suspicion.”
The Congress reminded the ECI that it is neither helpful nor productive to deflect from simple and straightforward requests with long-winded responses about the process of addition or deletion of voters, or blaming a political party’s organisational functioning, or claiming these voter lists were given to individual candidates, and so on.
