The Karnataka Police special investigation team entrusted with probing “vote chori” allegations in the Aland Assembly constituency has claimed to have evidence that a data entry operator was paid ₹80 for every fraudulent voter deletion application received on the Election Commission’s portal.

The leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, had alleged that names of at least 6,018 voters had been illegally deleted in Aland.

The SIT probe has found that a total of 6,018 fraudulent applications were made ahead of the 2023 Karnataka Assembly elections in Aland.

The probe team had raided properties belonging to BJP leader Subhash Guttedar,
who lost to the Congress’s B.R. Patil in the 2023 Assembly polls. A source told The
Telegraph that the duo had been opponents for the last several decades and had represented Aland for four tenures each.

“Immediately after the 2023 Assembly elections, several complaints arose of discrepancies in the voter list. The data centre was located in the Kalaburagi district headquarters. The SIT team realised that the probes by the local police team and also by the CID cyber-crime unit were on the dot,” said a source in the government.

The SIT raided the properties of Guttedar, his two sons and their chartered accountant. Several laptops and mobile phones were seized, which allegedly belonged to people belonging to a cross-section of society. But the SIT has yet to determine how the data centre operators gained access to the Election Commission’s portal, where they allegedly deleted voters’ names.