ECI’s internal records of 2024 elections show that on 51 seats in Maharashtra, Haryana and J&K, votes counted differed from votes cast by citizens. In some seats, the votes counted from EVMs mismatched the votes cast by lakhs. While in 19 of the seats, the ECI did not even record the number of votes cast by citizens.
Why should it matter? These two counts must match. If they don’t it points to possible rigging. We cannot tell you if the ECI was blind in these cases or did its officials hide any potential rigging. Worryingly, the ECI can’t vouch for the sanctity of elections if it does not keep these records correctly. By intent, or otherwise.
Read Part 1 of our Election Audit series here:
My colleague Venkatesh Nayak and I accessed ECI’s internal records of 63 parliamentary and 467 assembly constituencies across two states and one union territory. All of these constituencies went to polls in 2024. This is the first time anyone outside the commission has reviewed these records as the commission never makes these records public.
In our examination of these records, we came across two kinds of discrepancies: constituencies where fewer voters walked in, but more votes were counted, and where more voters walked in, but fewer votes were counted.
Then there’s the third kind, where election officials did not even record the count of voters who walked in to cast their votes. A ‘0’ marked against the number of votes polled can mean one of the two things: either no one voted in these seats or the officials faked the records. Either way, the ECI declares the results even before these records are scrutinised.
These internal records were hard copies, running into 4,212 pages. We digitised them, re-checked this big dataset and dug in to find anomalies that did not fit under the electoral laws.
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