Rahul Gandhi, the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, reiterated his demand to the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to release data on the Karnataka Assembly polls.

“CEC Gyanesh Kumar – stop giving excuses. Release the evidence to the Karnataka CID now,” Rahul wrote on his X handle on Thursday afternoon.

Rahul’s allegations against the CEC accusing him of supporting and sheltering “vote thieves” was refuted by the Election Commission of India as “incorrect and baseless.”

Stepping up the ante against the central poll panel, the Congress MP said the Chief Election Commissioner has blocked the investigation being carried out by the Karnataka CID.

“After our Aland candidate exposed the fraud, the local EC official filed an FIR, but the CID investigation has been blocked by CEC,” Rahul wrote.

On Thursday morning when Rahul “exposed” the deletion of voters in the Aland Assembly constituency in Karnataka he had said the EC has not provided answers to the questions raised by the state’s CID.

After Rahul’s address to the media, the central poll panel in its response did acknowledge that there were “certain unsuccessful attempts” to delete electors in Aland in 2023.

The EC also stated that an FIR had been filed, adding that the BJP had won the seat in 2018 and the Congress in the 2023 Assembly polls.

“The Karnataka election officials have sent multiple requests to ECI to comply with the investigation – blocked by CEC. Details of destination IP, device ports and OTP trails have been withheld – blocked by CEC,” Rahul alleged in his post on X.

“If this vote theft had not been caught and the 6,018 votes had been deleted, our candidate could have lost the election,” he claimed.