Congress MP and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Thursday made serious allegations, saying that elections in India were being tampered with through what he called “Vote Chori” or vote theft.

He presented internal data and poll analysis to support his claims and accused the Election Commission of working closely with the BJP and hiding key voter-related information.

"Why doesn’t BJP ever face anti-incumbency?" While speaking at a press conference in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi raised concerns about a pattern he said was becoming too regular to be ignored. "Anti-incumbency affects every party in every democracy. But for some reason, the BJP is the only party that does not have it," he said.

He referred to the recent elections in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, saying that opinion polls, exit polls, and even Congress’s own internal data had predicted very different results, but the actual outcomes showed unexpected and large changes. "Exit polls and opinion polls were indicating one thing. Our internal surveys indicated the same. Then all of a sudden, the outcome shifts in a different direction," he added.

Rahul Gandhi pointed specifically to the Maharashtra Assembly elections as an example of major concern. He claimed that between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections, there was a sudden and unusual addition of one crore new voters.

"In Maharashtra, adding more voters in 5 months than we did in 5 years raised our suspicions. Then there was a dramatic increase in voter turnout post 5 pm, but our booth workers on the ground never reported such a turnout. Something wasn't adding up," he stated.

"In the Vidhan Sabha, our alliance was decimated. But in the Lok Sabha, we swept. Extremely suspicious," Gandhi pointed out.

Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission of blocking transparency and possibly helping the BJP.

"We were surprised when the EC announced that it was going to destroy the CCTV video from polling booths," Rahul said. "The video could have been used to examine voting trends, particularly the suspicious jump in voting after 5.30 pm. Rather than dispelling doubts, the EC's action raised more questions."

He also criticised the EC for not providing the voter list in a machine-readable digital format, making it very hard for parties to check for duplication or fraud. "The voter list is the people of this nation, not the BJP's," he said. "But the Election Commission will not give it to us in a format that can be analysed. That in itself made us sure that something is amiss, that the EC is shielding the BJP and aiding it to rig the election."

To explain the difficulty, Rahul Gandhi showed a thick bundle of printed pages and said, "This is what we've been supplied. If I want to verify whether somebody's voted twice, I have to take a picture of them and then manually check it against each page, laborious, nigh on impossible. We were initially going to scan several seats. But when we've had a look at the layout, we realised why the EC doesn't supply us with digital information, they don't want us to vet it."

He also said that the voter list was printed in a way that made it impossible to scan using OCR software. "This is no accident," Rahul explained. "This is by design. Had the EC provided us with electronic data, we would have been able to analyse it in 30 seconds. Instead, we took six months to decipher one seat alone. The EC is defending this defective paper format, and the question must be asked: Why?"

Rahul Gandhi said that all of these problems led the Congress to formally complain to the Election Commission, but they did not get any proper response.

"Maharashtra results vindicated our belief that the election was stolen," he added.

He also showed examples of the same person being listed more than once in the voter list.
 "Take this one instance, Gurkirat Singh Dang. He is found four times, at four different polling booths, with the same name and address. And there are 11,965 such repeated entries in one constituency alone."

On fake voter addresses, he explained,
 "There are three kinds of fake addresses: Addresses that don't exist, House number 0, street number 0, Unverifiable or fake places.
We discovered more than 40,000 of those phony voters. We counted 46 individuals in Booth 366 as supposedly residing in a one-bedroom home. But when we went to verify, nobody was there."

He also directed a message to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying, "Let's not forget that the Prime Minister is in power with a very thin majority, just 25 seats. And we are saying to the Election Commission: you're not in the business of destroying Indian democracy; you're supposed to protect it."

He claimed that tampering with voter rolls and destroying CCTV footage were now criminal offences. "All this data is evidence, this is a crime against the Indian Constitution, against the Indian flag. And what we have done here is just one assembly segment. We have analysed the pattern. We are completely sure that this crime is being committed on a huge scale, state after state," he said.

Rahul Gandhi also accused the EC of trying to erase the evidence. "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."

He ended his statement by saying, "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."

Congress has demanded that Voter lists must be shared in machine-readable digital format, CCTV footage from polling booths should be preserved and voter data must be verified in a transparent way.