Several years before Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of colluding with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to 'steal' votes, his current political ally, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, had made similar allegations.
Naidu, who leads the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and is now a key partner in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), has a long history of raising such concerns.
In March 2019, when he was serving as Chief Minister, Naidu alleged that the names of as many as eight lakh TDP voters had been deleted from the electoral rolls. The ruling party at the time, Naidu’s TDP, engaged in a virtual war of words with the main opposition, the YSR Congress over the contentious issue.
“Eight lakh TDP votes have been removed. They used Form-7 for the purpose. Looks like they may even remove my vote tomorrow,” Naidu wrote in a post on X (then Twitter).
The then State Chief Electoral Officer, Gopala Krishna Dwivedi, maintained that the ECI had only permitted the deletion of 40,000 voters across 74 assembly constituencies, and only 10,000 had been deleted at the time. A month after Naidu's allegation, the TDP was defeated in a landslide, winning just 23 of the 175 seats, while the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) secured 151.
The TDP, now the second-largest ally in the NDA, recently raised new doubts about the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise conducted in Bihar. In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the party sought clarity on the scope of the exercise, stating it should not be conducted "within six months" of any major election and should not be linked to citizenship verification.
Naidu had also flagged alleged irregularities in the voters’ list in December 2023, when he was in the opposition. He blamed the then YSRCP-run state government for the issues, claiming that the prescribed procedure for voter enrollment was not being followed. Naidu’s TDP-led alliance went on to win the state election in a landslide, and he became Chief Minister for the third time.
In 2004, while he was Chief Minister, Naidu launched an attack on the ECI, alleging that the poll panel was "more responsive to unfounded complaints of opposition parties, especially about the so-called irregularities in electoral rolls."
In his fresh allegations on September 18, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, cited details of alleged attempts to delete votes from Karnataka's Aland constituency ahead of the 2023 assembly polls. He also claimed that voters were fraudulently added in Maharashtra's Rajura constituency using automated software.
Gandhi, who has been leading a 'vote chori' (vote theft) campaign, accused CEC Gyanesh Kumar of 'protecting' those 'destroying' Indian democracy by refusing to share technical details of the persons behind the alleged attempts to delete names from the electoral rolls in Karnataka.
The ECI responded with a five-point rebuttal, denying that votes can be deleted online, as Gandhi had misconceived. The poll panel explained that portals and apps only allow applications to be filed, which must then undergo a multi-step verification process.
However, in a key admission, the ECI acknowledged that there had been "unsuccessful attempts" to delete electors in the Aland Assembly Constituency in 2023, for which an FIR was filed by the ECI itself to investigate the matter.
Also read: Naidu urges collectors to continue ‘SwachhAndhra’ drive
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