The story of how a veteran politician and Congress MLA B R Patil, from Karnataka’s backward Aland constituency averted the deletion of 5,994 names from the voters’ list in his seat, ahead of the 2023 Assembly polls, begins with an alert Booth Level Officer (BLO). Aland was one of the two seats spotlighted by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a new “vote chori” charge on Thursday.
BLOs are tasked with physically verifying applications filed online for voter list additions or deletions in constituencies in their charge.
The BLO for one of the booths in Aland was going through deletion requests made in the December 2022-February 2023 period – for a voter list revision ahead of the May 2023 Karnataka Assembly polls – when she spotted an application to remove the name of one of her relatives, who was very much alive and a resident of the constituency.
The BLO contacted the relative, who said he had no idea who had made the application. “The family members of the BLO, who are supporters of the Congress, and B R Patil, alerted the leader’s son,” sources familiar with the case said.
Patil, a four-time MLA from Aland, and Congress workers then spread across the 254 election booths in the constituency to find out whether similar applications had been made for deletions, without the knowledge of the voters concerned. Congress leaders said they found around 20-30 such names per booth, amounting to a total of 6,670 voters.
At his press conference in Delhi Thursday, Gandhi said: “Someone tried to delete 6,018 votes. We don’t know the total number of votes deleted in Aland in the 2023 elections… (But) The top 10 booths with maximum deletions were Congress strongholds. The Congress had won eight of these 10 booths in 2018. This was not a coincidence; this was a planned operation.”
Patil, who eventually won Aland by 10,348 votes in 2023, says his workers and supporters were targeted. “Most of the voters chosen for deletion were minorities, Scheduled Castes and backward classes, who form the Congress vote base,” he said.
* How EC, police got involved
After its workers had confirmed irregular deletions at their level, the Congress asked the EC to conduct ground-level verification across Aland, and to file a criminal case against persons behind the applications. The verification found that remote applications had been received for deletion of 6,018 names across Aland’s 254 election booths, and that of them, only 24 no longer lived in the constituency while 5,994 were still residents there.
On February 21, 2023, Kalaburagi Assistant Commissioner and Aland Returning Officer Mamatha Kumari filed a police complaint against unknown persons on charges of impersonation, providing false information, and forgery. The FIR accused them of using “multiple mobile phones to place online applications for deletion of names of voters, without the consent or knowledge of the voters”.
In a statement Thursday, after Gandhi’s press conference, the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) said Aland poll officials had received 6,018 applications online in December 2022 for removal of names. “Suspecting the genuineness of such a large number of applications… verification of each application was conducted.”
The modus operandi, as per the initial findings – also talked about by Gandhi Thursday – was to use the name of the first person on the voter list at a booth, acquire their phone number, and via it an OTP, to login into the EC app to make requests for deletions, sources said.
Police sources confirmed that several people whose identities were used to log in and make deletion requests were clueless about what had happened. Probe findings also suggested that the deletions were processed in a “centralised operation” – which Gandhi referred to as a “call centre” operation from a location outside Karnataka.
Subsequently, after the Aland police hit a wall, the probe was handed over to the Karnataka Police CID, which sought technical data from the EC regarding app usage. The servers containing the information, sources said, are operated by the EC or agencies contracted by it.
While the EC complied with a data request by the CID early on in the investigation, subsequent requests for specific data got no response, according to details of official communication between the CID and EC which are in the public domain.
On Thursday, Gandhi said: “The CID in Karnataka has sent 18 letters in 18 months to the EC. They have asked for some very simple facts: give us the destination IP (Internet Protocol) from where these forms were filled; give us the device destination ports from where these applications were filed; and third, OTP trails, because when you file, you have to get an OTP.”
In its statement Thursday, the Karnataka CEO said it had “handed over to Superintendent of Police, Kalaburagi district, on 06.09.2023 all the available information with ECI for completing the investigation”. This information, it said, included “Objector’s details”, such as name, voter ID number and mobile number used for log-in “and the mobile number provided by the Objector for processing, software application medium, IP address, applicant place, Form submission date and time, and user creation date”.
The statement added that the CEO “has already been providing any other assistance/information/documents to the investigating agency”.
However, police sources say that after the September 2023 correspondence, the EC did not respond to multiple requests by the CID, including one as late as February 1 this year. In this letter, police sought details of the destination IP and destination port from where the requests for deletions originated.
Aland, a shifting seat
The Aland seat is located in the backward Kalyana Karnataka region of the state, with a large population of SC/STs and minorities. Patil is a Lingayat leader, and his arch rival is Congress-turned-BJP leader Subhash Guttedar, who belongs to a backward group.
Patil has won the Aland seat four times since 1983 – twice on a Janata Dal ticket, once on the ticket of B S Yediyurappa’s Karnataka Janata Party, and in 2023, for the first time, as a Congress candidate.
Guttedar has also won the Aland seat four times, since 1994 – twice on the ticket of the Karnataka Congress Party of S Bangarappa, once on a Janata Dal ticket and in 2018 on a BJP ticket.
Patil lost in 2018 to Guttedar by a narrow margin of 697 votes.
A Congress leader pointed out that veteran leaders such as Patil and Guttedar of rural constituencies like Aland “know their own and their rivals’ voters thoroughly”. “In an urban constituency where battles are close, organised efforts at addition or deletion of votes may go under the radar.”