Congress leader Rahul Gandhi launched a fresh offensive against the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Thursday, accusing him of being complicit in large-scale voter deletions across the country by protecting the alleged vote thieves. Gandhi claimed that a “group of people” were systematically targeting millions of voters for deletion, not through individual efforts, but by using sophisticated software.
“I am not going to say anything on this stage that is not backed up by 100 per cent proof,” Gandhi said, adding that he was prepared to demonstrate how elections were being “rigged” in India. “This is another milestone in showing the youth of this country how democracy is being destroyed.”
The senior Congress leader alleged voter deletions were carried out specifically in areas where the Congress was strong. Citing the 2023 Karnataka Assembly elections, he said voter IDs had been removed using fake logins and mobile numbers originating from outside the state.
He presented the Aland constituency as a case study, where at least 6,018 voters were targeted for deletion. “We don’t know the full number of votes deleted in Aland… It is much higher than 6,018. But somebody got caught, and it was caught like most crimes—by coincidence,” Gandhi remarked.
Gandhi presented his claims with individual cases. In one example, a voter named Godabai allegedly had a fake login created in her name, through which 12 deletions were attempted. “Goda Bai has no idea,” Gandhi said.
He also highlighted the case of a man named Suryakant, who purportedly deleted 12 voters in just 14 minutes. Among them was a woman named Babita Choudhary, both of whom Gandhi brought on stage during the press conference. Suryakant claimed that he had no idea about any of these deletions.
In another instance, a man named Nagaraj was linked to two voter forms being filled within just 38 seconds at 4:07 am. “It is humanly impossible,” Gandhi argued, challenging young people to test how long it would take to complete such forms manually.
Rahul Gandhi alleged that the deletions were part of a centralised, automated programme. According to him, an operation running at “call centre level” ensured that the first voter of each booth appeared as the applicant. Mobile numbers used in the process were from outside Karnataka, he claimed, suggesting coordination across states.
“The question is, whose numbers are these, how were they operated, and who generated the OTPs?” Gandhi asked, as slides of evidence played in the background during his presentation.
The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, accused Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar of shielding those responsible for the alleged manipulation. He said that the Karnataka Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had written 18 letters to the Election Commission between February 2023 and September 2025, seeking information related to the deletion scam, but had received no substantive reply.
“The Chief Election Commissioner of India is protecting the people who have destroyed Indian democracy,” Gandhi declared. “Karnataka CID has written 18 times in 18 months for information, but the EC is not giving it.”
He went further, stating that if the ECI failed to release the requested data to the Karnataka CID within a week, it would be “definitive proof” that the CEC himself was protecting those engaged in “vote chori”.
The Congress leader also extended his allegations to Maharashtra, citing the Rajura constituency where voters were allegedly added using the same mechanism. “Fake voters with absurd names and addresses have been added,” he claimed.
Promising to release even more evidence in the coming days, Gandhi said his “hydrogen bomb” on vote theft would soon be dropped.
This was Rahul Gandhi’s second press conference on alleged “vote chori”. On 7 August, he had accused the Election Commission of colluding with the BJP to enable electoral fraud. At that time, Gandhi claimed that after a six-month study by a 40-member Congress team, over 1,00,000 bogus entries had been found in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura Assembly segment alone. That presentation had also alleged fake voters, fabricated addresses, suspicious father names, destroyed CCTV footage, and consistent refusal by the ECI to provide voter data.
