Days after Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi alleged "industrial-scale rigging" in the 2024 Maharashtra assembly elections, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Maharashtra has issued a detailed rebuttal, backed by electoral data and statutory procedures.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the CEO called Gandhi’s claims "misleading" and clarified that “Indian electoral laws do not provide for any centralised addition or deletion of electors.” The clarification came in response to an op-ed by Gandhi published on June 7, in which he claimed that the voter roll had been artificially inflated with fake entries.
Gandhi had written: “...number of registered electors in Maharashtra in the 2019 Vidhan Sabha elections was 8.98 crore, which rose five years later to 9.29 crore for the May 2024 LS elections. But a mere five months later, by the November 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, the number had leaped to 9.70 crore. A crawl of 31 lakh in five years, then a leap of 41 lakh in just five months.”
Responding with statistics, the CEO stated that the gross addition of electors from the 2019 assembly polls to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections was 13.9 million, and an additional 488,200 electors were added between May and November 2024 — not including the number of deletions during the same period.
Countering another point from Gandhi’s article — that Maharashtra’s number of registered electors (97 million) exceeds the state’s adult population of 95.4 million — the CEO said this comparison is flawed. “Any population projection through a statistical tool cannot be a basis for stopping or allowing addition or deletions in the electoral roll,” the post read, explaining that voter registration is done “based on actual individual forms received, field verification, and decisions made by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), with full transparency to all recognised political parties.”
Highlighting the collaborative nature of electoral roll updates, the CEO pointed out that booth-level agents (BLAs) from political parties are integral to the revision process.
“Indian National Congress (INC) appointed 28,421 BLAs in Maharashtra. No serious objection was raised by any BLA or by INC candidates until after the results were declared. It was only post-results that INC began raising this issue,” the post noted.
