Voter list ‘manipulation’: Why it is a wild goose chase

This isn’t pessimism — it’s realism.

There’s an old adage in criminology, not tied to a single universally famous proverb but echoed in law enforcement circles, crime fiction, and even Sun Tzu–style strategy: “A clever criminal never strikes the same way twice.”

It’s about avoiding patterns. Once a pattern emerges, investigators can connect the dots. In criminology, this falls under modus operandi evolution — the way skilled offenders adapt their methods to evade detection.

Since 2014, much of what’s happened in Indian elections can be read through this lens. It’s not about perfecting a method; it’s about constantly changing it so detection is always one step behind. By the time people spot the pattern, the perpetrators have already moved to a new one — and identifying that takes another year or more.

I saw this dynamic play out up close in the run-up to the 2019 parliament elections. After the assembly election results of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, and Mizoram — where Congress took the first three — voters across the country felt a renewed hope that a non-BJP government might sweep the Parliament elections.

It was in that moment of optimism that, thanks to good friend Priyank Kharge, I found myself at a closed-door interaction at the Taj West End in Bangalore with Rahul Gandhi, who was rallying both influencers and influentials.

He urged everyone to work towards bringing change at the Centre. That evening, over a cup of coffee with my IBM colleagues, our conversation drifted from the day’s events to one pressing question — how could we use our skills to support Congress at this crucial hour?  One suggestion stood out: the recent assmebly elections had shown large-scale voter list manipulations, and tackling this could be the clincher. We could help by detecting and removing duplicate voters from the rolls.

Someone in the group had already run a sample online analysis and found the same voters listed in different booths within a constituency, and even across constituencies in Karnataka.

Being a tech-heavy group, the discussion quickly turned to solutions. An AI researcher with a PhD in pattern recognition proposed triangulating voter lists using machine learning to identify duplications. The catch? Election Commission data wasn’t available as a full, machine-readable list — only individual searches were possible at its portal or provided as printed booth-wise list.

That’s when an OCR specialist stepped in, offering to digitise the entire list using advanced recognition technology he was developing. An AI analyst followed up, promising to run custom tools on the triangulated data to produce booth-wise and constituency-wise duplication reports.

As the lone non-techie — but with experience in government advocacy — it fell to me to convince Congress. My first stop was Kharge, who was then Karnataka’s Social Welfare Minister. After several failed attempts, I met with the Karnataka Congress’s election cell coordinators. None seemed to grasp the depth or significance of the proposal.

Rejected and dejected, I wrote to Jairam Ramesh, copying Rahul Gandhi and Prof. Rajeev Gowda: “I have a team of coders with expertise in machine learning who can help the party identify duplicated voters nationwide. In light of deliberate voter duplication in Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, we can pinpoint and provide a complete list of duplicated voters using our proprietary ML tools.”

I explained: “Our tool will detect similar names, reconstruct family trees from voter data, and isolate duplications while filtering out genuine cases.” I also added that Karnataka PCC’s Data Research Department seemed “clueless about how to proceed” when I met them with the proposal.

My closing suggestion: “The party can take this data to State Election Commissions, raise it as a campaign issue once we have national duplication figures, and share it with booth-level workers to prevent multiple voting.”

To my surprise, Jairam Ramesh replied within 15 minutes: “My colleagues will reach out to you very soon.” He copied Ayush Baid, AICC’s Election Control Room coordinator for the 2019 polls, besides Varun Santhosh and Angad Kapur.

Nothing happened as promised. A week later, I reminded Jairam of the cost of inaction: “Nobody has reached out. If you’re not doing such an exercise, it would be a costly mistake.”

Soon after, Varun called. We discussed the plan in detail, and I shared a formal proposal, clearly identifying the problem as:

“There appears to be an organised effort to create duplicate voters nationwide, enabling individuals to cast multiple votes. With 5,000–10,000 planned duplications per assembly constituency, elections can easily be tilted.”

Not long after, I received a call from Praveen Chakravarty, head of Congress’s Data Cell. I was in an office videoconference, so I asked him to either share his number (since it wasn’t displayed) or call back later. Neither happened, and the trail went cold. I’m not sure whether my suggestion to call back bruised his ego, or if he simply got caught up in the workings of the upcoming elections.

A month after the 2019 electon results, in which Congress suffered one of its worst election defeats, I wrote again to Jairam: “We offered to analyse 900 million voters and provide booth-wise duplicate/fake lists in February within a month — pro bono. Is there any way we can still work on this?”

No reply came. Perhaps he thought, Elections are over. We’ll deal with it in 2024.

The “wild goose chase” wasn’t just my futile attempts to get Congress to act — it was also Congress’s own pursuit of a moving target.

In 2019, the crime was duplicate and fake voters quietly seeded into the rolls. Before that, allegations swirled about EVM tampering. Now, with Bihar’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the method seems to have morphed again — this time towards deleting legitimate voters.

The pattern is clear: the perpetrators never stand still. Each time one trick begins to draw scrutiny, another quietly takes its place. Just as in criminology, the modus operandi evolves, leaving investigators — and in this case, political opponents — always one step behind.

Which is why that old saying still holds true in Indian politics today: “A clever criminal never strikes the same way twice.”

The tragedy is that, while the criminals keep changing their methods, the chasers keep turning up late to the scene — still hunting for the forensics of yesterday’s crime.

(Ameer Shahul is the author of Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kodaikanal (Macmillan, 2023). His forthcoming book, Vaccine Nation: How Immunisation Shaped India, is scheduled for release later this month.)

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