Vote theft campaign: Congress to collect over 15 lakh signatures from State and send it to EC

Around 15 lakh letters from Kerala will be sent to the Election Commission in Delhi as part of the Congress party’s nationwide signature campaign against vote theft in the Lok Sabha and State Assembly, AICC General Secretary Deepa Das Munshi and KPCC Working President PC Vishnunath said at a press conference here on Saturday.

The Congress will collect five crore signatures from across the country and submit it to the Election Commission at a mega rally to be held at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan in late November.

14 lakh signatures have already been collected from Kerala. The letters will be sent from Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode.

The petition calls for photo-based, machine-readable voter rolls to be made available for public verification.

In addition, it is requested that photographic deletion and addition lists be made available for cross-checking before each election and that a rapid grievance redressal mechanism be established against cases of unfair deletion from the voter list.

The Congress claimed that the campaign received a huge response from the public. Widespread irregularities in the counting process, as exposed by Rahul Gandhi, have triggered a huge wave of public anger across the country, and this is now reflected in the size of the petition.

Ms. Das Munshi and Mr. Vishnunath warned that the vote theft seen in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections could be repeated in the upcoming local elections in Kerala.

Although numerous complaints were made to the Chief Electoral Officer, nothing was done. They claimed that the current system allowed arbitrary deletion of any person’s name from the voter rolls. Despite the objections, the government is embarking on a massive revision of the voter rolls and a large number of genuine voters in the 2002 rolls have been left out.

Ms. Das Munshi and Mr. Vishnunath pointed out that neither the Central government, the Election Commission nor the BJP responded to Rahul Gandhi’s detailed press conference raising allegations of vote theft.

They said the “Vote Theft” petition was a social crusade.

Election manipulations have seriously undermined the credibility of democratic elections in India, the officials added.