New Delhi: There were attempts to “steal” votes in Delhi ahead of the 2025 assembly elections and the Election Commission (EC) stands complicit in its inaction, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Saurabh Bharadwaj has said, with the poll body responding that it had addressed the AAP’s concerns when it flagged them in January.The episode comes against the backdrop of opposition parties’ claims of ‘vote theft’ in various parts of the country, most recently articulated by Lok Sabha leader of opposition and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Thursday, where he alleged coordinated attempts to fraudulently delete and add thousands of names from and to the voter lists in Aland, Karnataka and Rajura, Maharashtra respectively.In a press conference on Friday (September 19), Delhi AAP chief Bharadwaj claimed that in early January, then-chief minister and now-MLA Atishi had flagged a high number of applications made in party supremo Arvind Kejriwal’s New Delhi seat to add and delete voters.Atishi first flagged these applications to the EC on January 5 this year and continued to write to the poll body for a few days thereafter, but the panel did not take any steps to initiate an investigation into the matter, Bharadwaj alleged.Moreover, it also tried to hide information about proceedings pertaining to the chief minister’s concerns, he also said.According to Bharadwaj, Atishi on January 5 had flagged to then-Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar 6,166 voter deletion applications filed in Kejriwal’s New Delhi seat that winter.She also brought to the CEC’s attention cases where deletion applications were allegedly made in the names of some people who claimed they never filed them, said Bharadwaj.It is the EC’s job to get such occurrences investigated but the poll body, even though a sitting chief minister officially wrote to it with her concerns, did not set the ball rolling on a probe, Bharadwaj said.In August, the AAP filed an RTI query with the commission to follow up on a subsequent letter Atishi wrote to it on January 9 on the same topic, to which the commission refused to share the information sought as it was trying to “hide” evidence of “vote theft”, Bharadwaj alleged.While the EC acknowledged receiving Atishi’s letter, it did not provide information regarding which official was entrusted with acting on her concerns or regarding its communications pertaining to the matter on the grounds that these have “no relationship to any public activity or interest” and are therefore exempt from disclosure under the RTI Act.Asked if an FIR was lodged in the matter, the EC said it had “no information available”. Of the ‘current status’ of Atishi’s letter, the commission on September 9 replied that “no action is pending” on its part.“The file was closed without taking any action. Think about it, this is an organised racket. Our democracy is being looted in a thoroughly organised manner,” Bharadwaj said, going on to say that the EC “never got an investigation done” because that would expose those who made the deletion applications.Had ‘sent detailed reply’ to Atishi in January: ECHowever, the EC later on Friday said it had responded to the AAP’s concerns days after Atishi wrote her January 5 letter to the CEC.Delhi’s chief electoral officer (CEO) wrote to an additional secretary to the chief minister on January 8 that poll officials were “ascertaining the facts” written in Atishi’s letter and follow-up action would be taken.The New Delhi district electoral officer (DEO) submitted his findings to the CEO on January 10, with the EC saying on Friday that it had forwarded this alongside other relevant materials to Atishi in a 76-page response on January 13.In his response, DEO Sunny Singh had said that while Atishi’s January 5 letter mentioned 13,276 voter addition applications made in New Delhi between October 29 and January 2, data obtained from the EC’s ‘ERONET’ system indicated there were only 6,659 such forms submitted during this time period.While the AAP flagged 6,166 voter deletion applications submitted in New Delhi in the same time period, ERONET data accessed by Singh returned a total of 5,971 applications, he said.Of the 3,956 voter addition applications filed between December 15 and January 2, 327 had been disposed of, and 64% of these were rejected for want of sufficient information, the DEO said, claiming that the high rejection rate “signifies that the forms are being disposed of by observing multi-level scrutiny as well as field verification”.Police complaints were also filed in cases where applicants furnished “false information”, he added.Coming to voter deletion applications, Singh said that while there had been allegations of forms being filled in the name of people who never did so, “telephonic verification of the mobile numbers of OTP-based [application] submissions … confirmed that these mobile numbers belonged to the respective objectors”.“This raises doubts about the claim that forms were submitted without the objectors’ knowledge,” the DEO said.“Given the politically charged environment,” he added, it could not be ruled out that some applicants denied filing forms under political influence, and so a formal complaint was filed with the police requesting further investigation.Complaints were also filed in cases where some applicants who initially denied filing them “turned up later and submitted that they had filled Form 7 themselves”, said Singh.He also said that while Atishi had asked him for the ‘personal details’ of voter deletion applicants multiple times, he did not share this as it “may compromise objectors’ safety” and “would violate the principle and spirit of the right to privacy of objectors”.All actions taken by the election machinery adhered to the law and “allegations of non-compliance, inaction or lack of transparency are factually incorrect and devoid of merit”, the officer had concluded.Responding to the EC, Bharadwaj asked the poll body to “provide the copy of FIR registered for impersonation, fraud for illegally trying to delete names of Valid voters and manipulating the electoral process”.“This was clearly an organised syndicate to hijack free and fair elections. People are keen to know if there had been any arrests? It’s been 8 months so chargesheet should have been filed by now,” he wrote on X.Bharadwaj added: “If you are waiting for an Affidavit, I am ready to sign the Affidavit and submit. We are not scared of frivolous prosecution by Govt.”After Gandhi had raised allegations of voter fraud in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly constituency last month, incumbent CEC Gyanesh Kumar asked him to either file an affidavit with his claims under oath or apologise to the nation.