As Rahul Gandhi repeats allegations of voter list discrepancies against the Election Commission, here is a fact-check of his claims: Ground report by OpIndia

As Rahul Gandhi postponed dropping his much-awaited ‘hydrogen bomb’ on the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the BJP, he came up with another PowerPoint presentation and the same old ‘vote chori‘ allegations to attack the election body and the ruling party. On 18th September, the forever-young leader of the Congress Party gave a detailed presentation accusing the ECI and the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, of systematically mass-deleting the names of Congress voters in Congress strongholds before the 2023 Karnataka elections. Claiming that he had 100% proof and that this was meant to save the country and the democracy, Gandhi alleged that a large-scale voter fraud was carried out through an orchestrated operation to manipulate electoral rolls. He cited the example of the Aland assembly constituency in Karnataka, and alleged that an attempt was made to mass-delete the names of voters from the electoral roll in the constituency a year before the 2023 assembly elections in a ‘centralised operation’ using software. He said that 6,018 deletion applications were filed in the names of voters who never submitted them. He alleged that the deletion applications were submitted “fraudulently” by impersonating and using mobile numbers from different states, and specifically targeting Congress supporters. To back his claims, he brought a woman named Babita Choudhary on the stage during the presentation and claimed that her name was among the names deleted from the voter list in Karnataka. Rahul Gandhi further alleged that the state CID sent 18 letters in 18 months to the Election Commission regarding the alleged mass vote deletion attempt but the Election Commission did not take any action. Rahul Gandhi’s allegations were fact-checked by OpIndia journalists Anurag Mishra and Harsh Vardhan. Here is what they found- Whether the name of the woman was deleted from the voter list The OpIndia journalists verified Rahul Gandhi’s allegation of the deletion of the name of Babita Choudhary from the voter list. The falsity of the claims of Gandhi and the woman was exposed with a simple search on the Election Commission’s website. When the OpIndia journalists entered her EPIC number, which flashed during the presentation, on the website, they found that her name was very much there on the voter list. The Election Commission revised the voter list in Karnataka this year, and the woman’s name was there in the list before the revision as well as after the revision. Subsequently, the OpIndia spoke to the concerned BLO to further verify the allegation. The BLO informed that the woman herself had requested to get her name deleted from the electoral roll, as she had changed her residence and was registered in the voter lists of two constituencies. Therefore, her name was deleted from one of the voter lists and retained in the other list of her choice. Allegations of mass deletion of the names of Congress voters Regarding Gandhi’s allegation of the deletion of the names of 6,018 Congress supporters in the Aland assembly constituency, the OpIndia journalists found that the allegation was a flat-out lie. To verify Gandhi’s claims of mass-deletion of voter names using a software, OpIndia talked to two Booth Level Officers (BLO) in the constituency, the current BLO and the previous BLO (who served there in 2023). The BLOs informed the OpIndia that it is not possible to delete the names of voters merely by submitting a deletion application (Form 7). There is a detailed procedure involving cross-checks for the deletion of the names of voters. Whenever the Election Commission receives an application for the deletion of the name of a voter, it kick-starts a multilevel verification process, starting with an on-ground verification by the concerned BLO. Notably, the Election Commission itself refuted the baseless allegations of Rahul Gandhi, wherein he accused the poll body of not acting on the attempts of mass deletion of voters’ names. The Election Commission clarified that in 2023, some unsuccessful attempts were made using over 5000 mobile numbers in the Aland Assembly Constituency, and that the ECI itself filed an FIR for the investigation of the matter. Allegations made by Shri Rahul Gandhi are incorrect and baseless.#ECIFactCheckRead in detail in the image attached https://t.co/mhuUtciMTF pic.twitter.com/n30Jn6AeCr— Election Commission of India (@ECISVEEP) September 18, 2025 The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Karnataka also issued a clarification regarding Gandhi’s allegations of mass vote deletion attempts. Aland Case 2023@ECISVEEP pic.twitter.com/Z35F0PlWPW— Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka (@ceo_karnataka) September 18, 2025 In a statement posted on X, the CEO Karnataka stated that 6,018 Form 7 applications were received during December 2022, out of which only 24 were found to be genuine. The rest of the applications were rejected and no deletions were made based on those. On