Opposition to take ‘vote chori’ issue to the streets on November 1, ruling MLAs too point fingers at EC

All the senior leaders such as Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray, Raj Thackeray and Harshwardhan Sapkal are expected to participate in the march, which will be the first such protest against the EC in Maharashtra. The details of the march will be finalised by the senior leaders in the coming days

MUMBAI: After taking up the issue of alleged voter list fudging directly with the Election Commission (EC), political parties, mainly the opposition, have decided to take the matter to the people. Questioning the integrity of the poll body, they will hit the Mumbai streets on November 1 in a march similar to the one led by Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi in August.

iMumbai, India - October 19, 2025: Leaders of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and other parties hold a joint press conference at Sena Bhavan in Dadar to announce a protest scheduled for November 1 at the Election Commission office in Mumbai, India, on Sunday, October 19, 2025. (Photo by Satish Bate/ Hindustan Times) (Hindustan Times)

All the senior leaders such as Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray, Raj Thackeray and Harshwardhan Sapkal are expected to participate in the march, which will be the first such protest against the EC in Maharashtra. The details of the march will be finalised by the senior leaders in the coming days.

The announcement was made by the opposition leaders on Sunday afternoon in an interaction attended by Shiv Sena (UBT) Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut, former state NCP (SP) president Jayant Patil, Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant, MNS leader Bala Nandgaonkar and CPI leader Prakash Reddy among others. This is the third time that political parties have put up a united front against the EC and charged it with being “a slave of the BJP-led central government”.

“The voters list needs to be flawless, and hence all the political parties are fighting unitedly but the EC is not ready to accept its fault, which is a criminal act,” announced Raut. “We have to come to the conclusion that the poll body needs to be taught a lesson by holding a march on November 1. It will be against the high-handedness and corrupt practices of the EC.”

Raut said that all those whose voting rights were snatched away would come to Mumbai and “display the strength of voters to prime minister Narendra Modi, union home minister Amit Shah and the EC”. He also challenged the union home minister to begin the initiative of removing the names of infiltrators from the electoral rolls of Maharashtra. On Saturday, Shah had promised to “drive out every infiltrator” from West Bengal if the BJP came to power in next year’s assembly polls.

“The voters list is objectionable and has discrepancies and flaws,” said Sachin Sawant. “The EC is not giving the opposition the updated list and the opportunity to clear its doubts. The model process is not being implemented, and this is fatal for the democratic process.”

Jayant Patil pointed out that the reply given by the EC was not satisfactory. “They are not clarifying what they are doing about the duplication of names, incorrect age and addresses,” he said. “The commission said that the list was from October 2024; in that case, they should clarify when the initiative to revise it was taken up and its process, which they aren’t doing.”

Meanwhile, MLAs from the ruling parties too have begun raising the issue of discrepancies in the voters list. The latest among these is BJP MLA Manda Mhatre, who said that the bogus voters created problems for genuine candidates in the elections. “I contested the assembly elections from Belapur in 2004, 2009 and 2014,” she said. “In every election, I submitted a list of 20,000 to 25,000 bogus voters and duplication of names but no action was ever taken. This is despite pointing out the issue to the collector, election officer and BLO.” Mhatre added that officials too were often bribed to be part of this bogus enrolment.

A day before Mhatre’s statement, the video of which went viral on Sunday, Shiv Sena MLA Sanjay Gaikwad too had made similar allegations. “There are voters in my constituency who died 30 years ago and yet their names appear in the voters list,” he said. “The number of such voters is around 100,000 in my own constituency.”