Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi has called the change in storage of video footage of voting as evidence of “match-fixing.”

“Voter-list? They won’t give in machine-readable format. CCTV footage? They changed the rules to hide them. Photos and videos of polling? Not a year, these will be destroyed in 45 days,” Rahul wrote on X. “Those who were supposed to answer are themselves wiping evidence. It is clear the match is fixed and a fixed election is poisonous for democracy.”

On May 30, the Election Commission issued a letter and instructed the state chief electoral officials to destroy footage of CCTV, webcasting and all videos of the election process within 45 days, unless the same is challenged in a court of law.

“However, the recent misuse of this content by non-contestants for spreading misinformation and malicious narratives on social media by selective and out-of-context use of such content, which will not lead to any legal outcome, has prompted a review,” the letter read.

On September 6, 2024, the central poll panel had advised the state poll bodies to store the video footage of the election process from three months to a year.

Three months later the Narendra Modi government amended the 1961 Conduct of Election rules, keeping certain election-related documents guarded from public inspection. The amendment has been challenged in the Supreme Court.

Rahul has repeatedly spoken about the lack of transparency in the Election Commission, questioning the outcome of the polls and addition of voters in bulk, since the Maharashtra state polls last year.

An opinion piece penned by the Lok Sabha’s leader of Opposition earlier this month, Rahul had referred to the Maharashtra Assembly polls, in which the Congress was routed, as a “fixed match involving industrial scale rigging enabled by the subversion of the Election Commission”.

“The fixing side might win a game, but irreparable damage is done to institutions and people’s faith in the result. I am not talking of small-scale cheating, but of industrial scare rigging involving the capture of our national institutions,” Rahul wrote.

The Congress MP from Rae Bareilly has demanded the EC handover the electoral rolls in Maharashtra before last year’s Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, which happened within a few months.

“Number of registered voters in the 2019 Vidhan Sabha elections was 8.98 crore, which rose five years later to 9.29 crore for the May 2024 Lok Sabha elections. But a mere five months later, by November 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, the number had leaped to 9.70 crore,” Rahul wrote. “A crawl of 31 lakh in five years, then a leap of 41 lakh in just five months. So incredible was this leap that the registered voter total of 9.70 crore was even greater than the 9.54 crore adults in Maharashtra according to the government’s own estimates.”

The EC had dismissed Rahul’s claims as absolutely absurd and an affront to the rule of law.