Rahul Gandhi claims Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat ‘example of vote chori’ in 2024 polls: What he said, EC's retort

COngress leader Rahul Gandhi's monolithic lay claim in new delhi on th — that the Election charge “colluded with the BJP to steal elections” — had a central example. He said the Lok Sabha seat of Bangalore Central, which the Congress lost to the BJP by margin of less than 3 percentage points, had instance of “fake voters” and “duplicate voting”.The EC and the BJP had not yet reacted when this report was filed at 2.30 pm, August 7.What Rahul Gandhi claimed about Bangalore Central resultAs part of a detailed presentation to back his claims of large-scale theft or “vote chori”, he said that in Karnataka the Congress was expecting to win 16 of the 28 seats, but won only nine. The loss in Bangalore Central raised suspicion, in particular, he said.The party lost the seat by 32,707 votes, which was thin when one sees that seat had over 13 lakh votes cast. The winner, BJP's PC Mohan, and the Congress candidate, Mansoor Ali Khan, both got over 6 lakh votes each. The margin separating them was just 2.58% of the votes.Rahul Gandhi pointed towards one of the eight assembly seats that are part of Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.Mahdevapura, from where the BJP got a lead of over 1 lakh votes, offset the Congress gains from all other segments, he noted. “It's a huge imbalance,” he said.'One segment stolen, with it the LS election'He alleged, “We found that 1,00,250 votes were stolen in Mahadevapura,” citing instances of alleged duplicate voters and misuse of Form 6 that is used for new enrolments. He claimed there were fake addresses or bulk numbers of voters at one address, and invalid photos too.He showed voter rolls and what he claimed was an instance of a man being registered at four different polling booths. He said there were hundreds of such cases.In another example, he showed the rolls and claimed, a man was registered twice in Bangalore Central in Karnataka, and also in Maharashtra in Uttar Pradesh.He also showed Election Commission records to claim that 68 voters were registered with a beer bar as their address.He said the party had physically verified these anomalies by visiting these places, such as the brewery.Claims on Haryana, Maharashtra tooHe claimed that in Maharashtra, 1 crore new voters appeared between the Lok Sabha elections, in which the Congress and its allies won most of the state's LS seats, and the Vidhan Sabha election that they lost. “The crux of our argument was that the Maharashtra election was stolen,” he added.He made similar allegations about Haryana, where too the Congress won majority of the seats in the parliament polls of 2024 but lost the assembly election just months later.He also called the EC's decision to not keep polling-day surveillance footage “deeply suspicious”.He said PM Narendra Modi and the BJP, which fell short of majority on its own in the Lok Sabha 2024 polls, would have been out of power “if it lost just another 25 seats”. He said there was collusion and careful managements of the results.