Telangana Rakshana Sena chief Kalvakuntla Kavitha on Monday made serious allegations claiming that Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy's Kodangal Assembly constituency has thousands of duplicate and inter-state voters that have escaped scrutiny.
Making Kodangal, the Chief Minister's political bastion the centrepiece of her attack, Kavitha alleged that while over 7,000 voters were deleted from Bodhan Assembly constituency during the last 18 months, only 808 names were removed in Kodangal, despite what she claimed was a far higher number of duplicate entries.
According to Kavitha, her party's scrutiny of the electoral rolls found 22,433 duplicate voter entries in Kodangal. She further alleged that around 11,000 voters are simultaneously enrolled in Kodangal and Karnataka's neighbouring Sedam Assembly constituency, raising questions over the Election Commission's ability to detect inter-state duplication.
Highlighting the political significance of the figures, Kavitha claimed that the alleged 33,000 duplicate and inter-state votes are nearly equal to Chief Minister Revanth Reddy's winning margin from Kodangal in the 2023 Assembly election.
"If the Chief Minister won by almost the same margin, the Election Commission must explain whether these duplicate and inter-state votes influenced the result," she said, questioning whether Kodangal received preferential treatment during the revision process.
"It's not just money that is crossing from Karnataka into Telangana. Are votes also being transferred?" she asked.
Calling for systemic reforms, Kavitha said the country should move towards "One Nation, One Election, One Vote", where every eligible citizen has only one valid voter registration irrespective of migration.
"If inter-state duplicate voters are not identified, the entire purpose of the SIR exercise is defeated," she added, raising questions over the effetciveness of Election Commission's ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive.
Kavitha said that the data which she has presented are from the Election Commission website and demanded that the ECI publicly clarify on the alleged duplicate entries in Kodangal, and whether it has a mechanism to detect inter-state voter duplication.
