ECI urged to release machine readable booth-wise rolls for the past decade, publish complete logs of additions and deletions, make statutory forms searchable with timestamps
By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, Aug 9: Citing evidence from a six-month voter roll investigation in Mahadevapura, Bengaluru, the Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) on Saturday warned that “vote theft” could undermine democracy in the state.
The party’s 40-member team found 1,00,250 wrong or doubtful entries out of roughly 6.5 lakh, and cautioned that such manipulation could decide results in Meghalaya’s narrow-margin constituencies.
MPCC secretary Manuel Badwar stressed that the issue was not a party-versus-party matter, but a fundamental question of electoral integrity. “One person, one vote” was the principle at stake, he said, adding that when voter lists are riddled with errors, no result can be trusted.
Clean rolls, he argued, safeguard those in power and those in opposition.
The Mahadevapura probe combined official Election Commission of India (ECI) data with on-the-ground checks. It revealed 11,965 instances of the same person registered in more than one polling booth, some even across states.
Another 40,009 entries carried non-existent or unverifiable addresses, such as “House Number 0” or fathers’ names replaced with random letters.
The team also flagged 10,452 voters linked to a few addresses, including 80 registered in a one-room house, 46 in a single bedroom, and 68 tied to a brewery. A further 4,132 entries carried missing or invalid photographs, while 33,692 cases showed apparent misuse of Form 6, meant for first-time voters aged 18 to 23 years, to add elderly individuals, sometimes multiple times.
Badwar warned that in districts like East and West Khasi Hills, Ri-Bhoi, Jaintia Hills, and the Garo Hills, even a small cluster of false entries could neutralise genuine votes and swing a seat. Manipulation, he noted, is often targeted, designed to shift just enough ballots to change an outcome without triggering immediate suspicion.
The MPCC’s report criticised limited public access to electoral data, noting that rolls are often available only as unsearchable printouts and that polling-day CCTV footage is withheld. The party argued that without machine-readable data and access to footage, meaningful audits are impossible.
The consequences for voters, the report warned, are direct: duplicate entries can cancel legitimate votes, rolls can be padded with empty-house registrations, and genuine young voters can be excluded while older individuals are wrongly listed as “new”.
To address these issues, the MPCC urged the ECI to release machine-readable booth-wise rolls for the past decade, publish complete logs of additions and deletions, and make statutory forms searchable with timestamps. It also called for the secure release of polling-day CCTV footage, a public explanation where footage is missing, and the naming of the officials responsible.
The party further sought a court-monitored Special Intensive Revision in high-risk areas, random address checks for bulk-voter clusters, and cross-state de-duplication of voter lists. It demanded disciplinary or legal action against erring officials and the creation of a national helpdesk and online portal for voters to check entries, flag errors, and track corrections with a right to appeal.
Badwar concluded by warning that democratic erosion often happens gradually, through unchecked irregularities. For Meghalaya, he said, safeguarding the integrity of the electoral roll is the first step to protecting the legitimacy of future elections.