Overview
- At a press conference, Rahul Gandhi released "H-files" alleging that 25.41 lakh entries in the 2024 Haryana rolls were fake, including 5.21 lakh duplicates, and cited a stock photo of a Brazilian model appearing 22 times in Rai.
- He said Congress lost eight seats by a combined 22,779 votes and pointed to unusual divergence between postal ballots and polling-station counts, claiming a coordinated operation flipped the result.
- The Election Commission and Haryana CEO said no appeals were filed after draft rolls were issued on August 2, 2024, and final rolls on August 27, and suggested any evidence be placed before High Courts where around two dozen election petitions are pending, including in Rai and Hodal.
- Field reporting by The Indian Express found many flagged addresses housed large extended families whose members said they voted, while documenting some erroneous photos on rolls that allowed voting to proceed with other IDs.
- Separate reporting highlighted that the EC’s CDAC-built deduplication tool, used to flag photo-similar and duplicate entries, was last deployed in 2022 and has not been recently used, even as a Special Intensive Revision exercise proceeds.