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

About 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, the AICC General Secretary, Deepa Das Munshi and KPCC Working president P.C. 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 in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan at the end of November.

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

The signature campaign demands that photo-based, machine-readable electoral rolls be made available for public verification.

It also demands that photo-attached lists of deletions and additions are made available for cross-checking before every election and that a speedy grievance redressal mechanism be set up for cases of wrongful deletion from the voters’ list.

The Congress claimed that the campaign had drawn an overwhelming response from the public. The widespread irregularities in the counting process, as revealed by Rahul Gandhi, had triggered a massive wave of public outrage across the country, which is now reflected in the magnitude of the signature campaign.

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 body elections in Kerala.

Though numerous complaints have already been submitted to the Chief Electoral Officer, nothing has been done. They alleged that the current system allowed anyone’s name to be arbitrarily deleted from the electoral rolls. Despite objections, the government is pushing ahead with an intensive voter list revision, and a large number of genuine voters from the 2002 rolls have been excluded.

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

The “Vote Theft” signature campaign is a social crusade, they said.

The electoral manipulations have gravely undermined the credibility of democratic elections in India, they added