Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar addresses a press conference, in New Delhi, on Sunday
| Photo Credit:
ATUL YADAV
On a day when India bloc parties hit the streets with ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ in poll-bound Bihar, the Election Commission of India (ECI) accused Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi of spreading “lies” about voter roll manipulation which, he said, was an “insult to the Constitution.”
Addressing a press conference on Sunday, the CEC said without taking names: “Either they should file claims and objections on draft electoral rolls in Bihar and under oath in the next 15 days or offer public apology for making baseless allegations of vote chori.”
“Give an oath, or apologise to the nation. There is no third option. If we don’t get an affidavit within seven days, this would mean that all these allegations are baseless and the person who is saying our voters are fraud, should apologise,” the CEC said, asking if the voters were being called “liars.”
The last window for addressing anomalies in draft electoral list of Bihar, which opened on August 1, would end on September 1, after which he said nothing can be done.
Election Commissioners Dr Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, and Vivek Joshi and other ECI officials were present at the press briefing.
“It is an insult to the Indian Constitution if election petitions are not filed within 15 days but allegations of vote chori are raised,” he said, asserting that the EC does not fear “false accusations” hurled at them.
While leaders are making allegations, the truth is that all stakeholders are working to make Special Intensive Revision (SIR) a success in a transparent manner in Bihar, he said.
The CEC was responding to Rahul Gandhi’s recent press conference in which he claimed that the Congress had detected more than one lakh bogus voters in an assembly segment in Karnataka which helped BJP in 2024 LS polls. The CEC denied Gandhi’s charge about different categories of non-existent electors.
The PPT showed by the Gandhi was backed by dubious numbers as they do not belong to the Commission and accordingly the analysis too was far from the truth, Kumar stated.
The electoral laws and rules are clear that a person can raise an electoral issue outside the jurisdiction where his vote lies only after writing to Chief Electoral Officer or the ECI and under an oath, he said.
“How can we probe without evidence,” he asked. “They want us to carry out roving inquiry against lakhs of voters without any proof,” the CEC said.
“Lies spoken multiple times does not make it true,” he observed, stressing that “ECI will stand by voters like a rock.”
On his part, Gandhi reiterated that the whole country is “now aware that the ECI is stealing elections in collusion with the BJP.” He asserted that the India bloc will not let them succeed in their “conspiracy” to steal the Bihar assembly polls by voter additions and deletions through SIR. Gandhi made the statement at a gathering in Sasaram, Bihar at the launch of his 1,300 km ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ covering over 20 districts in the poll-bound State.
Meanwhile, the CEC defended the Commission’s decision to not share machine-readable voter list with political parties, saying that the Supreme Court, in 2019, prohibited circulation of these lists protect voters privacy. There was a difference between machine-readable and searchable formats, as per Kumar. The voter list available on EC websites can be searched using a voter card number and can also be downloaded while machine readable list is banned.
He said the Chief Election Officer of Bihar has resolved the issue of 3 lakh people who had election photo identity card number.
“More than one crore employees are engaged in the election exercise. Can ‘vote chori’ happen in such a transparent process?” he questioned.
On the issue of large number of dead voters, he stated that this figure is of people who died over the last two decades. The last SIR in Bihar happened in 2003 and purification of the electoral rolls happens only when enumeration forms are distributed to every household to get voter enrolment exercise afresh.
In other electoral revision exercises, dead voters can be delisted from the electoral roll only when their family members point that out to the EC.
On the timing of this electoral exercise, he stated that even the last SIR in Bihar took place between July and August.
Published on August 17, 2025
