Thirty members of the Indian parliament, including Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi, were detained by police following a protest against suspected voter fraud in recent state elections. Rahul Gandhi’s Indian National Congress party had found fake and duplicate voters in the electoral rolls, and accused the election commission of colluding with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The Election Commission rejected his claims, following which digital rolls were briefly unavailable from the EC website.
The protest also focused on a ‘special revision’ of voter rolls in the state of Bihar, where elections are scheduled later this year. The requirements for inclusion were criticised as being unreasonably complicated, and likely to disproportionately affect the poor, illiterate, and migrant labourers.
The opposition leader showed examples of duplicate votes, as well as obviously fake votes (one had parent’s name as ‘asdfg’ or something like that). The question is how common these are, and whether they are being used to swing elections a certain way.
Honestly, if the Election Commission had been more transparent and admitted the mistake instead of trying to hide the rolls, this might have been a non-event.