Shillong, Aug 9: The Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) today said if voter fraud can happen in Karnataka and Maharashtra, it can happen in Meghalaya.
“This is about the method, not the geography. If such practices can occur in one place, they can occur elsewhere,” MPCC Secretary Manuel Badwar said.
“In a close election—across East Khasi Hills, West Khasi Hills, Ri-Bhoi, Jaintia Hills, or the Garo Hills—concentrated wrong entries in one pocket can cancel honest votes across the constituency and flip the final result. Manipulation, if it occurs, is selective rather than total: it targets key seats and moves just enough votes to change outcomes without triggering blanket suspicion. When rolls are supplied as unsearchable printouts and polling-day CCTV is unavailable, proper audit becomes impossible,” the MPCC Secretary stated.
Calling for an urgent, time-bound corrective action by the Election Commission of India (ECI) after a data-driven case study from Mahadevapura (Bengaluru) indicated serious contamination of electoral rolls, the MPCC said, “This is not a party-versus-party issue; it is about the basic promise that one person equals one vote. If the voter list is wrong, the election result cannot be right.”
Pointing out that clean electoral rolls protect citizens he said, “We are not asking for an advantage; we are asking for a level field.”
The MPCC has put up five demands before the ECI that includes data transparency by publishing machine-readable, booth-wise rolls for the last 10 years; logs of additions and deletions; release Form 17C and Forms 6/7/8 with timestamps in searchable formats.
Seeking to protect evidence, the MPCC has demanded the commission to secure and release polling-day CCTV wherever legally permissible, court-monitored Special Intensive Revision in high-risk areas with random third-party address checks for bulk-voter clusters, robust, privacy-respecting de-duplication across booths and states.
It also demanded identification of officials who approved fake addresses or allowed mass stacking and to initiate disciplinary and legal action and launching of a national helpdesk and portal for voters to check entries, flag anomalies, and receive time-bound resolution with a right to appeal.
