Burden of proof: on India and election integrity Politics & News

The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, has made serious accusations regarding the 2024 Haryana Assembly election, turning the spotlight, yet again, on election integrity in the world’s largest democracy. At the very least, his analysis has proved that India’s electoral rolls are in a mess, which the Election Commission of India (ECI) says can be fixed only by an ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Mr. Gandhi, who evidently had a professional team of analysts working on it, made a claim that 25 lakh votes in Haryana were “fake” — i.e., either non-existent or duplicate — or one in every eight voters in Haryana, where the Congress had lost the 2024 election. As per Mr. Gandhi’s calculations, there were 5.21 lakh duplicate voters and 93,174 invalid voters in the State, and he claimed there were 1,24,177 voters with blurred or fake photographs on the electoral rolls. To prove this point, among other facts, he cited the example of a woman — a Brazilian model whose picture was available online — whose photograph appeared 22 times across different booths in Haryana. Earlier allegations of election manipulation included bulk deletion and addition of voters, which the Congress leader has said boosted the prospects of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and undermined the Opposition. In this, the ECI is accused of colluding with the BJP.

In its defence, the ECI has marshalled some technical arguments, but they do not clear the air, regardless of the merit of the Congress charges. The argument that complaints regarding electoral rolls should have been raised within stipulated timelines and that other complaints should have been litigated through election petitions may sound procedurally sound. But such a position does not mitigate the severe trust deficit that the ECI is facing. The Congress’s charges are by themselves no conclusive proof of fraud, though they certainly demonstrate systemic failure. The ECI’s defensive response and its overall tendency to raise veils of opaqueness in the electoral process add credence to the Congress’s charges in public perception. The best way to prove that the people who seemingly appear multiple times on the list did not actually vote multiple times is to air the recording which is made at each booth. On the disingenuous ground of voter privacy and secrecy, the ECI has restricted access to the video footage, electoral rolls and other details of the electoral process in the recent past. The only thing secret about voting should be the vote itself. Who the voters are, and who actually voted, must be open public records. The best way to allay fears regarding the electoral process is to make all information publicly available, retaining secrecy only with regard to the choice of the voter.