‘Vote robbery’ in UP: Congress cites report on 16.18 lakh ‘mysterious’ voter entries
‘Vote robbery’ in UP: Congress cites report on 16.18 lakh ‘mysterious’ voter entries
M.U.H
09/10/202634
Congress on Friday accused the Narendra Modi government and the Election Commission (EC) of “vote theft” in Uttar Pradesh, citing a report by The Reporters’ Collective that raised questions over the addition of 16.18 lakh voters to the state’s electoral rolls and the disclosure of their details.
“The vote thief is now carrying out vote robbery in Uttar Pradesh through SIR,” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote on X, alleging that the “conspiratorial duo of Modi-Shah” was resorting to voter-list manipulation out of fear of defeat in the state, where Assembly elections are due next year.
He cited the report to allege that names had been deleted on a massive scale, new voters added under suspicious circumstances, and electoral rules violated during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
“The scam happened at all three levels,” Ramesh said, referring to the removal of 2.96 crore names, the addition of 16 lakh voters in a suspicious manner and the alleged mysterious deletion of another 85,854 names.
He claimed that the process was aimed at handing the people’s mandate to the BJP.
“Around 16 lakh voters were added through Form 6, but according to the law, the details of the voters being added should have been made public. The details of these 16 lakh voters were not made public, and even now the UP CEO (chief electoral officer) has refused to provide their information.
“After SIR hearings, 85,854 pre-filled Form 7s were generated through the ERONet software, so that voters' names could be removed. These Form 7s were generated in the name of EROs (Electoral Registration Officers) with their signatures, after which they had virtually no option left but to remove those names,” his X post said.
The Reporters’ Collective, in its investigation, said the Uttar Pradesh chief electoral officer’s website did not contain the details of 16.18 lakh Form 6 applications that the ECI had said were collected during the enumeration phase of the revision, before the draft electoral roll was published on January 6.
The report argued that the law required details of applications for inclusion and deletion to be made public, allowing scrutiny of the claims.
It said the absence of the 16.18 lakh applications made it impossible to establish the identities of the voters, the constituencies or polling booths where they were enrolled, or whether their eligibility had been verified.
The investigation also cited the unusually high approval rate of 96.27 per cent for applications that would account for the additions, compared with rates of around 60-70 per cent in other states and approximately 18.5 per cent in Bengal during the same revision period.
The Uttar Pradesh CEO, Navdeep Rinwa, rejected the allegations in a post on X on October 7, calling the report “baseless and founded on false assumptions”.
Rinwa said booth-level officers had collected 16.18 lakh Form 6 applications during door-to-door visits between October 27, 2025, and January 6, 2026, from eligible citizens whose names were absent from the existing rolls when the revision began.
He said the applications were collected under ECI directions and that only Form 6 applications received during the claims-and-objections period after publication of the draft roll were required to be displayed on the CEO’s website as Form 9 lists.
“No provision of the law, rules, or the Commission’s directions was violated in this process,” he said.
Rinwa also disputed the report’s comparison of approval rates, saying there was no fixed formula requiring a particular percentage of Form 6 applications to be accepted and that each application was considered under the prescribed procedure.
“The circulated news regarding the percentage of Form-6 forms accepted is based solely on arbitrary conjecture without any rational foundation. There is no fixed formula or rationale requiring adherence to a specific percentage for accepting forms. Form-6 is accepted only after following the prescribed procedure as per the rules,” he wrote on X.
The Reporters’ Collective said it had sought clarification from Rinwa and the EC in Delhi before publication but had received no response by then. It also quoted Rinwa as saying during a phone conversation that there was “no mismatch in our data” and that the mismatch lay in the publication’s interpretation.
Ramesh said the Congress and the wider Opposition would continue their fight against what he called “Modi-Shah sponsored vote theft”, adding that the campaign was entering a decisive phase.
“In the end, CEC Gyanesh Kumar wants to steal the people's mandate of Uttar Pradesh's public and drop it into the BJP's lap, but now this game is over,” he said.
