Mumbai: Even as the Congress has accused the Election Commission (EC) of electoral roll manipulation, an investigation into an attempt to delete 5,994 votes in the Aland assembly constituency in Karnataka’s Kalaburagi district has hit a dead end as the poll body has not shared data crucial for completing the probe.The Hindu reports that a case from 2023, ahead of the Karnataka state assembly election, pertaining to an alleged attempt to remove electors by forging Forms 7 has made little progress.The issue came to light when B.R. Patil, then a candidate in Aland and a senior Congress leader, was tipped off about suspicious voter deletion applications. A complaint was promptly filed with the EC.“One of the booth-level officers received a Form 7 application to delete her brother’s vote, when he had not even applied … The application was made in the name of another voter in the same village, who was also not aware of it. This tipped us off,” Patil, now Aland MLA, told The Hindu.Following complaints, an on-ground verification of 6,018 Form 7 applications in Aland revealed that only 24 were genuine, linked to voters who had relocated. The remaining 5,994 voters were still residents, and their names were retained on the electoral roll, making them eligible to vote in 2023.However, the probe into the forgeries – registered under FIR 26/2023 at Aland police station for forgery, impersonation and false documentation – has made little progress.The Hindu interviewed individuals from the constituency who had not made any application seeking the deletion of their names from the voter list.Some applications claimed that the voters had ‘shifted’ to another place. In a number of instances multiple applications to delete people from the rolls – some of them apparently Congress members or supporters – were made in one person’s name.One such person was quoted as saying: “There were nine applications made in my name to delete voters from part number 71, where I am also a voter … In all these applications, while my other credentials, including EPIC [elector photo ID card] number and photo are correct, phone numbers are different in each application. None of them belong to me.”The investigation, carried out by the state’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), has revealed a well-orchestrated operation using the EC’s National Voter Service Portal, Voter Helpline app and Garuda app, The Hindu‘s report says.But when the CID requested “IP logs, date, time along with destination IPs and destination ports” to trace the devices behind the forged applications, the EC did not provide them data pertaining to the applicants’ destination IPs and ports.The CID, in the past two and half years, has sent 12 letters to Karnataka’s chief electoral officer, The Hindu found in the course of its reporting.The newspaper has further found that the EC shared data on over 5,700 forged applications, but details for around 1,300 were incomplete. Nine mobile numbers used to create accounts on EC apps were traced, mostly to Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, but their owners, many digitally illiterate, have denied involvement, per an unidentified senior official.The CID investigation raises questions over the EC apps’ security, particularly OTP authentication. The CID sought clarification on whether OTPs are sent to an applicant’s mobile number or the one listed in the form, but the poll body did not respond to the queries raised by the department.Patil, who won the 2023 election by 10,348 votes, in an interview to The Hindu said, “If we had not made a big issue about these applications, the votes may have been deleted.” He also claimed that most affected voters were Congress supporters.