New Delhi: A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe into alleged large-scale manipulation of electoral rolls in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura Assembly constituency and other areas during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The petition, filed by advocate and Congress member Rohit Pandey, has urged the Court to constitute an SIT headed by a former judge to examine allegations of wrongful deletions and fictitious additions in the voters’ list. Pandey said the matter, which he described as “very sensitive,” could come up for hearing within a week.
The plea draws heavily on claims made by Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi at a press conference on August 7. Gandhi had alleged that thousands of legitimate voters’ names were deleted and bogus entries were inserted in the Mahadevapura segment, part of the Bengaluru Central parliamentary constituency.
Pandey has also sought directions to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to halt further revision or finalisation of electoral rolls until an independent audit is carried out. The petition calls for binding guidelines to ensure transparency and integrity in voter list preparation, including mechanisms to detect and prevent duplicate or fictitious entries.
It further requests that electoral rolls be published in machine-readable, OCR-compliant formats to enable effective verification and public scrutiny.
“What is at stake here is not the outcome of a single electoral contest, but the integrity and credibility of the electoral roll itself,” the petition states. “When the roll is corrupted by wrongful deletions and fraudulent insertions, the right to vote ceases to be equally accessible, undermining universal adult suffrage.”
The PIL cites material from Gandhi’s press conference, including extracts of electoral rolls allegedly showing identical names in multiple polling parts and entries linked to non-existent or commercial addresses. Independent verification by citizens reportedly confirmed the presence of bogus and duplicate entries, it says.
Alleging “serious lacunae” in the functioning of the ECI, the plea argues that large-scale tampering with the rolls, if established, would violate the constitutional principles of equality and due process, as well as the mandate of “one person, one vote” enshrined in Articles 325 and 326.
