Vote for Democracy (VFD), a civic action group led by distinguished experts, has released a constituency-level analysis of Maharashtra’s 288 Assembly seats, highlighting serious anomalies in the November 2024 election.
The report, titled “Dysfunctional ECI and Weaponisation of India’s Election System”, draws on official Election Commission of India (ECI) and Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) data as well as accounts from polling staff and voters, raising questions about transparency and accountability.
The civic group is guided by election experts M.G. Devasahayam, IAS (retired), Coordinator of Citizens’ Commission on Elections; Professor Pyara Lal Garg, former Dean, Panjab University; Madhav Deshpande, specialist in computer software and architecture, and Professor Harish Karnick, former Professor, Computer Science, IIT-Kanpur.
Systemic vulnerabilities
The report released on Saturday (August 16, 2025) states that the “weaponisation” of India’s electoral system lies in the vulnerabilities of four components of the electronic voting process — microchips that record votes, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs), Symbol Loading Units (SLUs), and electoral rolls.
According to VFD, the system has ceased to be standalone since 2017 and is now linked to the internet, making it susceptible to manipulation. It further alleges that the ECI’s methods of managing voter rolls have created large-scale disenfranchisement, cumulatively posing a serious threat to electoral democracy.
VFD notes that in the November 2024 polls, Maharashtra recorded a sudden late-night surge in turnout. At 5 p.m., voter turnout stood at 58.22%, but by midnight it had risen to 66.05%, a jump of 7.83%, which amounted to about 48 lakh extra votes. The sharpest increases were recorded in Nanded, Jalgaon, Hingoli, Solapur, Beed, and Dhule, where double-digit spikes were observed, even though historically such late surges have been minimal.
The report also points out that several seats were decided by very narrow margins, with 25 seats won by fewer than 3,000 votes and 69 seats by fewer than 10,000 votes, suggesting that even small anomalies could have changed outcomes.
Erratic changes
The study highlights erratic changes in the electoral roll between the May 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the November 2024 Assembly polls. In just six months, the rolls expanded by more than 46 lakh voters, concentrated across 12,000 polling booths in 85 constituencies, predominantly in areas where the BJP had lost in the parliamentary elections. Some booths reportedly added more than 600 voters after 5 p.m., which would have implied an additional ten hours of polling that did not occur in reality.
Official records also showed discrepancies, with the ECI reporting over 9.64 crore voters on August 30, 2024, while the CEO of Maharashtra reported 9.53 crore for the same date. Within weeks, these numbers fluctuated sharply, with a sudden increase of over 16 lakh voters between October 15 and October 30, 2024.
According to the report, the data mismatches between 2019 and 2024 are also significant. In 2019, Maharashtra’s voter rolls for the Assembly polls were larger than those for the Lok Sabha polls by about 11.6 lakh voters, while votes polled increased by 8.4 lakh between the two elections. In 2024, however, the discrepancy was far higher, with rolls growing by nearly 40 lakh voters between the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls and votes polled increasing by more than 71 lakh in the same period. The report notes that voter rolls grew by 71.8 lakh between the 2019 and 2024 Assembly elections, while votes polled jumped by 96.7 lakh, a rise not explained by demographic trends.
The report further observes sudden and disproportionate vote surges that benefited specific parties. In the Lok Sabha elections held in May 2024, the BJP averaged about 88,713 votes per Assembly segment, whereas in the Assembly elections in November the average rose to 1,16,064 votes per seat, reflecting a sudden gain of 28,000 votes per seat without corresponding demographic growth. For example, in Kamthi, the Congress vote remained at about 1.35 lakh while the BJP gained 56,000 votes, and in Karad (South) the tally rose by 41,000 votes in just six months, a change not seen in five years. In Nanded, the Congress won the parliamentary seat but lost all six Assembly segments in the same area, receiving 1.59 lakh fewer votes despite simultaneous polling.
In high-profile seats
VFD also draws attention to high-profile anomalies, such as the addition of 29,219 voters in Nagpur South-West in six months, exceeding the ECI’s 4% verification threshold, with local booth officials admitting incomplete checks. In Solapur’s Markadwadi village, residents alleged that the EVM results did not reflect the actual votes cast, while police blocked a mock poll using paper ballots.
The report mentions several procedural and technical concerns, including the presence of routers near polling stations, sudden power cuts during counting, late arrival of EVMs at strong rooms, failures of CCTV surveillance, mismatches between Form 17C records and control unit counts, unexplained EVM battery readings, and alleged breaches of strong rooms. It questions whether the ECI has independent control over the EVM source code and highlights potential conflicts of interest, noting that BJP members sit on the boards of ECIL and BEL, the manufacturers of EVMs.
Amending ECI rules
Concerns were also raised about data secrecy and legal changes curtailing scrutiny. In December 2024, the ECI amended Rule 93 of the Conduct of Election Rules to restrict access to CCTV footage and Form 17C, just days after a court ordered their release in another State’s polls. In May 2025, the retention period for CCTV footage was reduced from one year to 45 days, allowing evidence to be destroyed before legal challenges could proceed. Despite 100% webcasting of polling stations, neither video footage nor VVPAT slips are available for public verification. The report further says that over 100 complaints of hate speech were filed during the Maharashtra polls, including against specific leaders, but no visible action was taken by the ECI.
VFD concludes that the scale, precision, and constituency-specific targeting of these anomalies point to a structured pattern of electoral manipulation rather than administrative error. It warns that Maharashtra’s 2024 Assembly elections serve as a case study of how India’s election system can be weaponised, and calls the findings a warning for future polls across the country.
Call for decentralisation
The organisation has demanded that the voter system be decentralised, with the ECI conducting only parliamentary and presidential elections while State Election Commissions conduct Assembly and local polls. It has also called for a forensic audit of EVMs, VVPATs, and voter rolls, public release of machine-readable rolls and election records, reversal of restrictive amendments to Rule 93, and legislative guarantees for end-to-end vote verifiability.