Evidence of Dodgy Poll Data Mounts; Let 130th Amendment Move Be Last Straw; High Court Demands 'SOP' Before 'Illegal Migrants' Are Rounded Up, Deported

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

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Snapshot of the day

August 21, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

The standard response of the Election Commission to the granular allegations of voter fraud that researchers, reporters and even political parties have unearthed over the past few years has been to point out that the primary stakeholder in an election – the losing candidate – has never filed a complaint about the result. This is why Amey Tirodkar’s story in the latest issue of Frontline is so significant. He focuses on the struggle Balaram Patil – candidate of the opposition Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) from Panvel in the 2024 assembly election in Maharashtra – waged to get the EC and then the courts to act upon evidence he had gathered of at least 25,855 names that had been registered more than once in his constituency. His efforts to have these extra ‘voters’ deleted before the 2024 assembly election failed and he ended up losing the election to the BJP by 51,000 votes.

Patil and his team sought to continue their investigation, this time looking at marked booth-level voter lists to see whether any of the names listed more than once in the constituency had also voted more than once. The EC refused to share the evidence it had so working on the basis of lists that his own booth-level assistants had saved, a calculation was attempted. “Through this process, they found a total of 11,628 votes that had been cast two or more