With senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleging "fake votes" in Karnataka and taking on the Election Commission, closer home, the Ghugus unit of the party has made a startling claim of finding 119 persons registered as voters from one locked house here!
Addressing a press conference here on Monday, the president of Ghugus City Congress, Raju Reddy, produced a list of 119 persons belonging to different castes and religions whose registered residential address was shown as house number 350 in Ghugus' Chemical Ward. The house belongs to one Sachin Bandurkar, Reddy revealed, adding that it was locked and had no occupants when Congress workers went there to check on the registered residents.
Ghugus City Congress president Raju Reddy and others during a press conference at Ghugus on Monday.
The disclosure gains significance in the light of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi's, and other INDIA alliance partners' claims of poll rigging in various states, including Maharashtra. Gandhi has demanded a "clean and pure" voter list from the Election Commission, casting aspersions over its working.
Reddy said that when Congress office bearers visited the house of the alleged 119 residents, it was found locked and unoccupied. He said investigations had also revealed that several houses in the city had house numbers marked as 'zero' and yet voters were registered at those addresses. The Ghugus City Congress chief said that many houses supposedly had more than 100 people residing in them.
He claimed that in Chandrapur Assembly constituency, a similar case was found in a small village named Pipri, where nearly 100 voters had shown a single house as their registered address.
The Congress alleged that this was a planned case of 'vote theft', clearly indicative of large-scale rigging in the Chandrapur Assembly elections.
Congress leaders alleged that the Election Commission was grossly negligent in preparing and verifying the voter list, and that such fake entries were deliberately added. The party has demanded that the voter list be corrected before the upcoming local body elections and that cases be filed against the responsible officials.