Rahul Gandhi accuses EC of helping BJP in 'vote chori', says Maharashtra results confirm their suspicion

Congress MP and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Thursday made explosive allegations, claiming that elections in India are being manipulated through what he called 'Vote Chori' (vote theft). Armed with internal data and polling analysis, he accused the Election Commission (EC) of colluding with the BJP and withholding vital voter information.

"Why doesn’t BJP ever face anti-incumbency?"

Speaking at a press conference in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi questioned a pattern he finds increasingly hard to ignore.

“Anti-incumbency hits every party in every democracy. But for some reason, the BJP is the only party that does not suffer from it,” he said.


Referring to the recent Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra elections, Gandhi said that opinion polls, exit polls, and even Congress’s internal surveys had predicted very different outcomes, but the actual results went in the opposite direction, with what he described as “massive swings.”

“Exit polls and opinion polls were saying one thing. Our internal polling showed the same. Then suddenly, the result moves in the opposite direction,” he added.

Maharashtra: “One crore mystery voters”

Rahul Gandhi specifically pointed to the Maharashtra Assembly elections as a major red flag. He claimed that between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections, there was a sudden addition of "one crore new voters", a number he called highly suspicious.

“In Maharashtra, the addition of more voters in 5 months than in 5 years raised our suspicions. Then there was a huge jump in voter turnout after 5 pm, but our workers on the ground reported no such turnout. Something wasn’t adding up,” he said.

“In the Vidhan Sabha, our alliance was wiped out. But in the Lok Sabha, we swept. Very suspicious,” Gandhi noted.

"EC destroyed CCTV footage, refused to share voter data"

Rahul Gandhi levelled serious allegations against the Election Commission, claiming it is obstructing transparency and potentially colluding with the ruling BJP.

“We were shocked when the EC said it was going to destroy the CCTV footage from polling stations,” Rahul said. “This footage could have helped analyse voting patterns, especially the suspicious surge in turnout after 5.30 pm. Instead of clarifying doubts, the EC's move raised even more questions.”

He also criticised the Commission for refusing to share the voter list in a machine-readable format, making it nearly impossible for parties to properly audit the rolls.

“The voter list belongs to the people of this country, not the BJP,” he said. “Yet the Election Commission refuses to share it in a format that can be analysed. That alone convinced us something is wrong, that the EC is protecting the BJP and helping it steal the election.”

To explain the hurdles, Rahul Gandhi showed a massive stack of papers. “This is what we’ve been given. Suppose I want to check if someone’s voted twice, I have to take a photo of them and then manually compare it to every page, a tedious, almost impossible process. Initially, we planned to review multiple seats. But once we saw the format, we realised why the EC doesn't give us digital data, they don’t want us to scrutinise it.”


He added that the paper lists provided by the EC are deliberately printed in a way that prevents optical character recognition (OCR), meaning the data can't be scanned and extracted digitally.

“This is no accident,” Rahul said. “This is by design. If the EC gave us electronic data, we could analyse it in 30 seconds. Instead, we spent six months decoding just one seat. The EC is protecting this flawed paper format, and we must ask: Why?”

"Election was stolen"

Gandhi said all these irregularities led the Congress to file a formal complaint with the EC. However, he said they received no meaningful response.

“Maharashtra results confirmed our suspicion that the election was stolen,” he said.

Rahul Gandhi also revealed specific cases where the same individual appears multiple times in the voter rolls.


“Take this one example, Gurkirat Singh Dang. He appears four times, in four different polling booths, with the same name and address. And there are 11,965 such duplicate entries in just one constituency.”

On fake voter addresses, Gandhi said: “There are three types of fake addresses:

• Addresses that don’t exist
• House number 0, street number 0
• Unverifiable or false locations

We found over 40,000 such fake voters. In Booth 366 alone, 46 people supposedly lived in a single-bedroom house. But when we checked, no one existed there.”


Taking aim at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi said, "Let’s not forget that the Prime Minister is in office with a very slender majority, just 25 seats. And we are saying to the Election Commission: you’re not in the business of destroying Indian democracy; you're meant to protect it."

He further alleged that the voter list manipulation and CCTV evidence now amount to criminal wrongdoing.

"All this information is evidence, this is a crime against the Indian Constitution, against the Indian flag. And what we’ve shown here is just one assembly segment. We have studied the pattern. We are absolutely convinced that this crime is being done on a massive scale, across state after state," he said.

Rahul accused the EC of trying to erase proof, stating, "For us, the CCTV footage and voter list are now pieces of evidence in a crime. And the Election Commission is busy trying to destroy them."

"I want the nation to know, a massive criminal fraud is being carried out against this country. It’s being done by the Election Commission and the party in power. What we’ve shown here is crystal clear, undoubtable proof," he concluded.

The Congress has demanded:

• Voter lists in machine-readable format
• Preservation of polling station CCTV footage
• Transparent voter data verification