In a fight against fake votes, the United Democratic Front (UDF) became the first political front to launch a website containing lists of duplicate votes with the same photographs from the same and nearby constituencies. Shortly after the Kerala High Court verdict on fake votes, opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala announced the release of the complete list and details of the fake voters on www.operationtwins.com on Wednesday night.
For the first time, a political front has taken an initiative to expose fake voters with evidence, which the public, activists and political parties can access freely. UDF’s booth level workers took this initiative against fake voters. The UDF wants to expose the massive number of fake voters present in the voters’ list ahead of the Kerala Assembly election.
To access the lists, the user must select the district and the constituency he/she wants to check for fake voters. The website contains the list of duplicate votes with the same photographs from the same constituency and the list of duplicate votes with the same photographs from nearby constituencies. The list contains the names, details of the fake voters along with Legislative Assembly Constituency (LAC), ID number, booth number, matching LAC, matching ID number and matching booth number.
The Opposition Leader alleged that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan added the fake votes to retain power. Chennithala alleged that the Kerala CM took the help of Left service associations to add the fake voters. After the Kerala HC verdict On Thursday, the senior Congress leader expressed surprise that the Election Commission found only 38,000 fake votes when the UDF found 4,34,000 fake votes. “The Kerala High Court verdict on the fake voter list is gratifying. However, the Election Commission (EC) is wrong in saying that there are only 38,000 dual voters. I stand firm that there are 434,000 fake voters,” Chennithala said.
He also added that there could be more than 434,000 fake voters. “It took many days. My colleagues and I worked hard to find these fake voters. So far, we have found 434,000 fake voters, but the number could be more,” he said, adding that the EC should have looked into the matter earlier.
Chennithala said that the EC asked the Booth Level Officers (BLO) to check for faker voters, but there are some limitations. The Election Commission has not been able to conduct inspections to detect fake voters and told the BLO to look into it on their behalf. The BLO can only record duplicity of names in the respective booth. However, they cannot find duplication in multiple booths with the same photo. “Similarly, BLOs cannot detect duplications spread across many regions,” he said. On the other hand, recent reports are also pointing at a weakness in UDF’s mechanism. A literal pair of twins from the 135th booth in Ottapalam was also accidentally included in the list. Arun and Varun were included since they shared similar name, address, age, and photo.
