The commission issued a three-part fact-check on Wednesday after an investigation alleged irregularities in 51 constituencies across Maharashtra, Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir. It described the social media claims as misleading and said official statistical reports already distinguished registered electors, electronic voting machine votes and postal ballots.
The dispute centres on records examined by The Reporters’ Collective, which said it reviewed returning officers’ documentation for 530 constituencies. Its investigation identified 32 contests where recorded votes cast and counted appeared inconsistent, alongside 19 where entries for voters attending polling stations were marked zero or nil.
The commission questioned the basis for describing some figures as internal records and said the allegations had not adequately identified the documents used. It maintained that Form 17C, completed at each polling station, provides the statutory account against which votes are checked.
Under that procedure, presiding officers prepare Part I of Form 17C after polling closes and provide copies to candidates’ polling agents. During counting, candidates’ representatives compare those figures with the votes recorded in Part II, the commission explained.
Maharashtra’s Chief Electoral Officer offered figures for Mumbai North, where 1,812,115 people were registered to vote in the parliamentary election. The commission recorded 1,036,496 votes cast, including electronic and postal ballots. Officials said the much larger electorate figure had been incorrectly treated as votes polled in the disputed comparison.
The constituency’s figures also require distinguishing ballots cast from those included in the final count. State election authorities listed 1,035,731 counted votes and separately classified 765 votes under applicable counting procedures, rather than treating the difference as unexplained missing ballots.
For Dahanu assembly constituency, Maharashtra officials listed 301,257 registered electors and 221,818 votes cast, including 220,919 electronic votes and 899 postal ballots. The difference between registered electors and participants reflected people who did not vote, the authorities said.
The commission similarly cited Beed assembly constituency, where 384,885 electors were registered and 238,845 votes were recorded electronically. Officials said the allegation that more than 145,000 votes had disappeared confused the number of eligible electors with the smaller number participating.
Haryana election authorities also disputed the interpretation of figures for Kaithal. Their constituency records showed 223,449 registered electors, 167,285 electronic votes and 1,566 postal ballots. They explained that adjustments for test and rejected votes, together with valid postal ballots, produced the final valid-vote total of 168,200.
The distinction matters because the number of people registered in a constituency is not a measure of ballots deposited on polling day. Likewise, the number of ballots received is not necessarily identical to the number of valid votes credited to candidates. Election officials say these separate stages are documented through prescribed forms and counting statements. Their explanations address several of the large numerical gaps highlighted in the controversy, although they do not by themselves resolve every question about entries in the additional returning officers’ reports examined by the investigators.
The investigators’ account, however, raises a separate question about the accuracy and completeness of entries in returning officers’ records, rather than simply comparing the electorate with turnout. The investigation said it had examined thousands of pages and found anomalies in records intended to reconcile polling-station figures with counting totals.
Those findings remain contested. The commission’s constituency examples rebut particular interpretations, but the disagreement also concerns which records should be compared and whether apparent errors in administrative documents have been satisfactorily explained. The investigation did not establish that the reported differences amounted to electoral manipulation.
Maharashtra’s election office said polling agents had received the prescribed records and that electronic machine figures were checked during counting. It also stated that it had received no complaints alleging differences in the voting figures concerned.
The commission publishes election statistics and constituency index cards detailing electors, machine-recorded votes, postal ballots and overall participation. Such categories are not interchangeable: registered electors include those who abstain, while some ballots may be excluded from valid-vote totals under counting rules.
The contested investigation covered 467 assembly and 63 parliamentary constituencies in the three territories. Its authors said one constituency report, from Devsar in Jammu and Kashmir, could not be located among the records they examined.
