Congress MLA Rizwan Arshad, who represents the Shivaji Nagar constituency in Bengaluru, has questioned the decision to re verify 9195 votes in the electoral rolls of the constituency. The MLA raised alarm on Monday, January 30, two weeks after the electoral rolls of the constituency were published on January 15.
"To my surprise, nearly 8000 votes out of the selected 9195 votes belong to Muslim and Christian communities. This exercise has been initiated selectively in only 91 of 193 voting booths in the constituency," a letter by Rizwan to the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Karnataka stated. The MLA told TNM that a meeting was called to convey the reverification of 9195 votes in the constituency after the publication of the electoral rolls.
"This is a biased action with malafide intention to deny minorities their fundamental right to vote and manipulate the results of the upcoming election,” Rizwan Arshad added in the letter to the CEO.
The Election Commission, on January 15, released the final list of voters for the three assembly constituencies, which fall under city civic body limits in Bengaluru - Shivajinagar, Mahadevapura and Chickpet.
The electoral rolls revision in these three constituencies were delayed after a large-scale voter data theft by a private company was investigated by The News Minute in November 2022.
When TNM published the investigation, we had also revealed how private entities pretending to be booth level officers had visited homes in Shivajinagar in October 2022 and tried to collect voter data. We could however not establish which company sent these fake BLOs.
Previously, a complaint was filed with the Election Commission in October 2022 claiming there were defects in the electoral roll of the Shivajinagar Assembly Constituency.
The complaint filed by seven people, Afsar Pasha, Bhaskar D, Girisham N, Shrikant S, Mohammed Inayath, Sheikh Dawood and Anwar Basha, all residents of central Bengaluru, called for a reverification of the voter lists in the constituency. One of the complainants Girisham, a BJP sympathiser, said that they had carried out their own survey in the constituency in February 2022 and had found thousands of voters to be fake or no longer residing in the constituency.