NEW DELHI, 17 AUG

Hitting back at Rahul Gandhi for his 'vote theft' charges against the Election Commission, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Sunday served a seven-day ultimatum on the Congress leader to submit a signed affidavit to back his claims, else his allegations will be considered baseless and invalid.

In his first press conference after Gandhi levelled allegations of 'vote chori' in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and several opposition leaders flagged issues about revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, a combative Kumar asked Gandhi to either apologise or back his claims with a signed affidavit as required under electoral rules.

"Give an affidavit or apologise to the nation. There is no third option. If an affidavit is not given within seven days, this means that all allegations are baseless," said Kumar, flanked by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi.

The remarks by the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) came on a day when Gandhi-led opposition launched the ‘Vote Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar and stepped up attacks against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the poll-bound state.

Kumar said the SIR exercise was aimed at removing all shortcomings in the voter list, and it is a matter of grave concern that some parties are spreading misinformation about it, "firing from the Election Commission's shoulder".

"If one thinks that by making a PPT presentation with wrong facts, the ECI will act, that is not the case. EC cannot act without the affidavit in such a serious matter as it would be against the law and the Constitution," Kumar said.

Levelling allegations of "vote chori", Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had on 31 July, through a presentation at a press conference, cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls to claim that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka through five types of manipulation, including duplicate voters, fake and invalid addresses and single-address voters.

The chief electoral officers of several states had asked Gandhi to file an affidavit under oath on his claims, but he had refused to do so.

The CEC on Sunday admitted that there could be discrepancies in the electoral rolls and asserted that SIR was the only way to correct this. He, however, contended that a person being present in multiple voter lists does not automatically mean that he or she also voted multiple times.

Kumar also said the poll panel has already identified and corrected more than three lakh cases of multiple people having the same voter identity card numbers, but the duplicate voter issue of one person being listed as a voter at multiple places can be resolved only through exercises like SIR.

"At the ground level, all the voters, district presidents of political parties, BLOs are working transparently, validating and giving video testimonials. It is a worrying matter that these efforts are not reaching their national and state-level leaders, or they are ignoring them to create confusion. The truth is, all the stakeholders are walking in tandem to make the SIR successful; they are working hard," Kumar said.

The CEC also urged all political parties to point out the mistakes in the Bihar draft electoral rolls before 1 September.

Kumar said the EC cannot discriminate among political parties, and both ruling and opposition parties are equal before the poll authority.

He said the list of names deleted from Bihar's draft electoral rolls following special intensive revision has been posted on the websites of district magistrates within 56 hours of the Supreme Court's orders.

The apex court, while hearing a bunch of petitions challenging SIR, had last week asked the Election Commission to publish details of 65 lakh deleted names from the voters list with reasons of non-inclusion to enhance transparency in the process.

Soon after Kumar's 85-minute press conference ended, Congress said the CEC answered none of the questions raised by Gandhi meaningfully and called his assertion of the Election Commission making no distinction between opposition and ruling party as "laughable". Several opposition leaders described the press conference as a "monologue" by the CEC.

With the opposition questioning the timing of the electoral roll revision in Bihar, Kumar said that it is a myth that SIR has been carried out in haste and emphasised that it is the EC's legal duty to correct the voter list before every election.

"Doors of the Election Commission are open to everyone, and booth-level officers and agents are working together transparently to carry out the SIR exercise," he said.

The CEC asserted that neither the EC nor the voters are scared of "baseless allegations" of double voting and "vote chori".

"The Election Commission will remain steadfast like a rock with voters of all classes without bothering about politics being played by some," Kumar said.

Kumar also recalled that the Supreme Court, in a 2019 judgement, had prohibited sharing machine-readable voter lists as such an act would violate the privacy of voters.

"We have to understand the difference between a machine-readable voter list and a searchable voter list. You can search the voter list available on the Election Commission website by entering the EPIC number. You can also download it. This is not called machine-readable.

“Regarding machine-readable, in 2019, the Supreme Court also studied this subject in depth and found that giving a machine-readable electoral roll can violate the privacy of the voter... The machine-readable voter list is prohibited. This decision of the Election Commission is after the judgment of the Supreme Court and is from 2019," Kumar said on the opposition demand.

The Congress and other opposition parties have been pressing the EC to provide a machine-readable digital copy of Maharashtra voter lists, alleging irregularities in the 2024 state polls.