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Journalism of Courage
Two major developments have taken place since Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made several allegations against the Election Commission (ECI) on September 18, including the misuse of online voter deletion forms in Karnataka’s Aland constituency.
Since then, the EC has rolled out a feature that requires those seeking to register as voters, or applying for deletion and corrections, to verify their identity using Aadhaar-linked phone numbers.
And the Congress government in Karnataka has constituted a Special Investigation Team of the CID to expedite the probe into the Aland case.
The Aland case was already under investigation and involved tracking the digital trail of the illegal deletions attempted via the EC’s online services, including its mobile apps.
While the investigation involves examining mountains of data (the digital fingerprints) to ascertain the electronic devices from which the deletions were attempted, the digital nature of the probe does offer prospects of finding suspects.
How is the investigation progressing? What data do the police want from the Election Commission, and why? How was the “electoral fraud” attempted? We explain.
Electoral registration officers are empowered to make corrections and deletions to the electoral roll, either on their own or acting on applications made to them. One of the ways to make such applications is through Form 7, on the grounds of the voter’s death or change of residence.
In Aland, an alert Booth Level Officer (BLO) spotted that a deletion request had been made for a relative who was alive and living in the constituency. This was in the December 2022 to February 2023 period, ahead of the May 2023 Karnataka Assembly polls.
Local Congress leader B R Patil was then alerted. Patil, who lost the 2018 Aland polls by 697 votes, worked actively to find out whether this was an organised attempt across the constituency.
Congress workers spread across the 254 election booths in the constituency to find out whether similar deletion requests, without the knowledge of voters concerned, had landed on the desks of other BLOs. Their inquiries revealed that around 20-30 names of voters had been similarly sought to be removed from every booth in the constituency, amounting to a total of 6,670 voters.
Congress workers then demanded a ground-level verification by the Election Commission and the filing of a criminal case.
The ground-level verification revealed that 6,018 names were sought to be deleted through remote applications across the 254 Aland election booths, and out of these, only 24 voters had actually moved away.
Based on these findings, then-Assistant Commissioner for Kalaburagi and returning officer for Aland, Mamatha Kumari, filed a complaint at the Aland police station on February 21, 2023, against unknown persons under Indian Penal Code sections for impersonation, providing false information, and forgery.
According to the FIR, unknown persons “have used multiple mobile phones to place online applications for deletion of names of voters without the consent or knowledge of the voters”.
The deletion of electors’ names — “most of whom were minorities or Dalits”, according to BR Patil — was averted. Patil won the 2023 polls by a margin of 10,348 votes over his arch rival Subhash Guttedar of the BJP.
The case was initially handled by the local police. The police sought data from the ECI about each of the illegal deletion applications and the phone numbers used to request the deletions.
“Based on the instructions given by ECI, the CEO, Karnataka has handed over to Superintendent of Police, Kalaburagi district on 06.09.2023 all the available information with ECI for completing the investigation,” a CEO Karnataka statement said on September 18.
“The shared information includes Objector’s details, including Form Reference Number, name of the Objector, his EPIC number and mobile number used for log-in and mobile number provided by the Objector for processing, software application medium, IP address, applicant place, Form submission date and time, and user creation date,” the statement said.
After the case did not make much headway, the probe was handed over to the cybercrime division of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Karnataka police in December 2023.
While the case remained largely dormant through 2024, it was revived again in 2025, with the CID writing a series of letters — from February to September — to the ECI through the CEO, Karnataka, for additional data to facilitate the probe.
What is the additional data sought by the Karnataka CID?
One of the crucial bits of information being sought is the destination IP and destination port for the ECI’s servers that were used by the electronic devices of suspects to seek illegal deletions of voters.
“During the course of investigation, the IP Logs are provided. On perusal the Destination IP and Destination Port are missing. Therefore, it is requested to direct the concerned to provide the same,” the CID has said in its letters to the ECI.
The CID is seeking information on whether OTP/Multi Factor authentication facility is used on ECI apps like the National Voter Services Portal, Voter Helpline App, and other online platforms. The CID also wants to know whether the OTP/authentication facility is needed to upload deletion applications.
“If authentication like OTP s exists, then whether the OTP will be sent to Mobile No. used for login or Mobile Number provided in the form by applicant or both?” the CID said.
The CID has also requested a certificate under section 65 B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 “by the person holding lawful control/user from where the logs were created during the activities and generated” to make the IP logs given by the ECI admissible as evidence in court.
Why has the CID sought details of the destination IPs and destination ports?
Destination ports are the ports on computer servers from which requests coming through web servers are processed. Destination IP addresses are described as the “home address” of devices on a network used to define the location where data requests should go.
According to sources, information on the destination ports and destination IPs is needed to facilitate a quick analysis of the access of the ECI apps/servers during the period of the illegal deletion applications in Aland.
The data provided by the ECI in September 2023 runs into lakhs of pages and the additional details of the destination ports and IP addresses would help narrow down the search for the suspect devices, sources said.
The data provided by the ECI so far is for dynamic IP addresses, where hundreds of devices are allotted the same IP address. Finding the correct ones in the investigation would thus take several months of analysis, sources said.
“The IPs provided were dynamic IPs, using which geolocation of devices used to make these forged Form 7s is difficult,” sources familiar with the probe said.
What is the current status of the probe?
The probe has found that nearly 75 mobile numbers were used to log in to ECI’s online services to seek the deletions, and as many as 3000 fake/random phone numbers were assigned for the applicants on Form 7. The illegal vote deletion exercise occurred without the knowledge of the voter or the applicant (objector) seeking the deletions.
