'EC’s Postcard Clause Turns Proof of Residence on its Head’: LDF Candidate Who Challenged Poll Body

The Election Commission of India and chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, entrusted with the constitutional authority to ensure free and fair elections, have not been able to rise above suspicion, especially after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s exposé of vote manipulation, now referred to as ‘vote chori’ in Gandhi’s words. 

What did the six-month investigation in Mahadevapura, an assembly constituency in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat, reveal? The analysis of votes polled here showed over 1 lakh fake voters and five types of fake voter entries – duplicate voters (11,965 cases); fake addresses (40,009 cases); multiple voters registered to a single address (10,452 cases); invalid photos on ID cards (4132 cases); and misuse of Form 6 for new voters to be registered (22,692 cases) without the EC’s verification.

The Congress says while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) trailed in the other seven assembly segments of Bangalore Central, the 100,570 fake voters in Mahadevapura won them the Lok Sabha seat.

Thrissur in focus

The EC’s Form 6 has come under scrutiny in the Thrissur Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala, where the BJP got its first and only victorious Lok Sabha candidate, actor Suresh Gopi, who is now a Minister of State Petroleum and Natural Gas in the Union government. 

In a surprising move, the EC directed that a person could register as a voter with simply “the postal department’s posts received/delivered in the applicant’s name at the given address.” Earlier, proof of address was established by the latest utility bill like electricity, water, gas; passport, ration card or driving license.

The ‘postcard clause’ was brought in 2016, says CPI and LDF candidate V.S. Sunil Kumar, who came second to Gopi, and has challenged the EC over voter fraud. “Yes, we missed this stealthy clause in the 2019 Lok Sabha election three years later, but we now realise this stipulation of a postcard/letter as proof of address is not mandated by the Kerala state Election Commission for local elections. This is completely violative of the Representation of Peoples’ Act and its rules,” Kumar said.

This deliberate act by the EC turns the proof of residence on its head, said Kumar, as he outlined the eligibility requirements for a new voter to be registered in his letter to the chief electoral officer of the state. “It is settled by law by various judgements of the Supreme Court and the high court that ordinary resident means a permanent resident who has a house, dwelling, livelihood, business… and is permanently residing in the constituency,” he said.

However, a simple postcard delivered/received cannot be proof of residence, says Kumar.

Former CEC N. Gopalswamy said it was difficult to comment on the circumstances under which the 2016 directive was brought in. However, he added, “When the electoral registration officer sends the booth level official for verification of proof of residence, quite often the person may not have a gas or electricity bill as they do not have either services. So, a postcard/letter is good enough for now.” 

Gopalaswami said that in previous decades, the EC found an excess of two and a half crore voters aged 25, compared to the figures in the 2001 Census. “This was because people who registered again did not delete their voter card in the previous place of residence. Instead of refusing to register the person, we recommended the insistence on Aadhar card as it would electronically delete the previous card. But we were stopped by privacy activists who went to the Supreme Court and stopped the compulsory use of the Aadhar card. I think it was a [unwise] move on [the] part of the activists.”

Kumar said, “A staggering 1,49,500 persons were included in the existing voters list [in Thrissur] when the last electoral roll was published in April, 2024. This is much higher than the state average of 70,000 additions in a parliamentary constituency.” 

Urban constituencies that see a lot of movement, like Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam – which added 63,008 and 78,713 voters respectively – did not see such a spike in voters as in Thrissur.

For instance, in 2019, Thrissur ranked ninth in the number of voters added in the state’s 20 constituencies; five years later, in 2024, it ranked number one. As a Congress Kerala unit had posted at the time, “Thrissur saw an addition of 62,318 voters in 2019; while the same constituency saw an additional 1,46,656 (2.3 times more) voters [in 2024], making it the largest constituency in Kerala.” There is a discrepancy of 2,844 between Kumar and the Kerala Congress's versions.

A vigilant LDF and Congress had filed multiple complaints after the publication of the voters’ list as early as January 2024, months before the Lok Sabha election, but there was no response by the EC.

As Kumar told The Wire, “Let’s look at the events – the draft voters list was published on October 7, 2023 where 45,924 applications on Form 6 were received and 42,807 names were accepted. The final voters list was published on January 22, 2024. However, as the EC press release shows, between December 10, 2023, and March 25, 2024, another 73,731 applications were received, and on the last day of filing nomination, April 4, 2024, another electoral list of voters was published. As per the EC’s rule 16, the Electoral Registration Officer is required to publish on his notice board the list and invite objections from political parties if any under Rule 19. This was not done after the first list in January and April in 2024.”

Media reports in the state have shown the same pattern in Thrissur that was exposed by Gandhi in Bangalore. So blatant was the fraud, as reports show, that 11 members of Gopi’s immediate family and his driver were registered as voters in Thrissur, all under the same address, Bharat Heritage in Nettisery, which Gopi had rented. It was found that Gopi’s brother and wife were registered in Kollam.

The Congress has filed a complaint that Gopi himself had submitted a false affidavit that he had been domiciled in Thrissur for more than six months before filing for his nomination; Gopi was a registered voter in Sasthamangalam, in Thiruvanthapuram, where he is a permanent resident.

EC fails to rebuild trust

The CEC’s directives in the last few months do not allay suspicions of fraud and manipulation: For starters, on May 30, 2025, an EC directive said that all CCTV data, webcasting and photography of the election process at various stages shall be destroyed 45 days after the declaration of results. This flies against a citizen’s right to information and proof, justice and right to challenge election fraud.

The timing of the amendment could not be more proof of the EC’s intention – it came just two weeks after the Punjab and Haryana high court had directed the EC to release election papers and videos of the Haryana state elections, where the results provoked accusations of electoral fraud. 

While the EC uses digital data bases for voter lists and electoral rolls, it has been accused of denying access to those who want to scrutinise the documents by providing data only in paper printouts rather than in an electronic format. 

Gandhi said he had to go through lakhs of printed documents to prove voter fraud, which took him six months as opposed to the 30 seconds it would have taken if he had access to the same in electronic form.

The EC has repeatedly refused to upload booth-wise voting data, especially after significant discrepancies of 5-6% between the initial turnout percentages declared by the EC and the final figures came to light during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It showed a stunning surge of voters after voting closed in the evening. Form 17C details the number of votes polled at each booth and making it public is crucial for cross-checking results.

To make matters worse, there was furore over the EC’s arbitrary SIR in Bihar where it deleted almost 65 lakh voters barely months before the state polls. The EC has refused to publish the list of names of the excluded voters citing legal constraints, despite demands for one.

Shortly after Gandhi’s press conference on voter fraud in August, the EC removed the digital Bihar voter list from its website, which had been uploaded only a week before on Aug 1. It was replaced with scanned, non-machine readable lists that make scrutiny harder.

The Supreme Court is hearing the case which is scheduled to come up in October, 2025.

Since the EC has refused to give any information, Kumar has written to all the booth level officers in the state under RTI to give him the voter list.

“Thrissur has 1,275 polling booths and we have written to the officers to give us the voter list, around 1,100 voters in each booth, to check the bonafides of each voter, crosscheck address and see how many have been added falsely, and also under the EC’s directive of establishing residence with a postcard/letter,” he said.

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