SC refuses to entertain plea seeking SIT to probe Rahul Gandhi’s vote theft charge

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a petition seeking that a Special Investigation Team be formed to look into allegations raised by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi about electoral roll manipulation in the Bengaluru Central parliamentary constituency, The Indian Express reported.

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi asked the petitioner, Rohit Pandey, to pursue the matter before the Election Commission instead, Live Law reported. In response, the counsel for the petitioner said that a representation had been submitted to the poll panel but no action had been taken yet.

The bench, however, refused to entertain the matter and disposed of it.

“We have heard the petitioner’s counsel,” Live Law quoted the bench as saying. “We are not inclined to entertain the petition, which is purportedly filed in public interest. The petitioner may pursue before ECI, if so advised.”

Pandey, in his petition, had sought an independent investigation into the charges, The Indian Express reported.

He claimed that he had verified the claims and “found sufficient prima facie material to establish” that it revealed “a systemic attempt to dilute and distort the value of lawful votes, thereby necessitating urgent intervention by this Hon’ble Court in the larger public interest”.

Pandey said that he had found thousands of invalid and duplicate entries.

This “strikes at the very root of the constitutional guarantee enshrined under Article 326 [universal adult suffrage], violates Article 324 [superintendence of free and fair elections by the Election Commission of India]..,” the petition added.

It sought a direction that no further revision or finalisation of electoral rolls be undertaken until an independent audit of the rolls is conducted, Live Law reported.

Pandey also demanded that the Election Commission should frame guidelines to ensure transparency, accountability and integrity in the preparation, maintenance and publication of electoral rolls, including mechanisms to detect and prevent duplicate or fictitious entries.

He further urged the court to direct the poll panel to publish electoral rolls in accessible, machine-readable and Optical Character Recognition-compliant formats to enable meaningful verification, audit and public scrutiny.

‘Vote theft’ in Mahadevapura

On August 7, Gandhi said that his party had spent six months examining the electoral rolls in Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency and found discrepancies in more than one lakh names.

The Congress leader claimed that the electoral rolls included 11,965 duplicate entries, 40,009 voters with fake or invalid addresses, 10,454 “bulk voters” registered in a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs and 33,692 voters in whose cases there had allegedly been misuse of Form 6.

The Election Commission’s Form 6 is an application document for registering new voters.

He alleged that this was evidence of the poll panel having colluded with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Election Commission had dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as “false and misleading”.

Gandhi, on August 7, also alleged that the poll panel had refused to share digital voter lists because it could expose dubious and fake voters who allegedly help the Bharatiya Janata Party win elections.

Two days later, the Election Commission replaced the digital draft voter lists in Bihar with scanned images of the voter lists on its official websites.

The digital draft lists are machine-readable and easier to analyse for errors and patterns on a large scale. The scanned versions make this process harder.

The Bihar draft voter lists were released on August 1 after the poll body finished the first phase of the special intensive revision of voter lists in the state, removing more than 65 lakh voters. It alleged that these voters were either dead, already enrolled or had shifted permanently.

The revision of the electoral rolls in the state was announced by the Election Commission on June 24.

As part of the exercise, persons whose names were not on the 2003 voter list needed to submit proof of eligibility to vote.

The draft rolls were published on August 1 and were kept open for “claims and objections” by individuals and political parties until September 1. As many as 7.2 crore electors were listed in the draft rolls, while 65.6 lakh names were removed from it.

In September 30, the Election Commission published the final electoral roll, which excluded at least 47 lakh voters in Bihar.

Also read: EC replaces digital draft voter lists in Bihar with scanned images that make finding errors harder