Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan during an interview with ‘The Hindu’ in Mumbai on August 17, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Vinaya Deshpande Pandit
Former Maharashtra Chief Minister and Union Minister Prithviraj Chavan claimed on Monday (August 17, 2026) that there are over 27,000 duplicate voters in his Karad South Assembly constituency.
Mr. Chavan said that although his votes and vote share had increased in the 2024 Assembly polls compared to the 2019 elections, he had lost the election. After conducting an analysis of the voters’ lists for himself and for five other surrounding Assembly constituencies, he claimed that there were 56,118 duplicate voters in the region.
“I feel cheated. Does the Election Commission want a free and fair election at all? While vote chori is happening in other parts of the country, there is an effort to enumerate the same voter several times here,” he said during an exclusive interview with The Hindu on Monday (August 17, 2026).
“In my constituency alone, there are 21,132 voters who have been registered 48,741 times,” he said, adding that voters with the same first name, middle name and surname appeared for as many as 15 times in the same constituency. “I have submitted all this data to the District Collector, requesting that the electoral roll be cleaned during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) at the very least,” he added.
“Take the example of Rani Kate from Karad. She is 29 years old and has been enumerated twice in the same constituency, with different EPIC numbers. Even Adke Sakshi Ashok, age 18 years, appears twice in the list, with all other details being the same except for the EPIC numbers. The name ‘Patil Sachin Shivaji’ appears 15 times, while the name ‘Patil Sanjay Shankar’ appears 14 times. There are several voters whose names appear anywhere from twice to 15 times,” he said.
“How many Narendra Damodardas Modi will you find in the same constituency? Then how come people with the same name, the same father’s name and the same surname appear in such large numbers in the same constituency?” Mr. Chavan asked.
He has filed an election petition in the Bombay High Court. When asked why he raised the issue in 2026, less than two years after the election, he explained that the ECI no longer provides machine-readable voters’ lists. “It only gives the voters’ list in pdf format. We have painstakingly converted the entire data Excel sheets and thereafter analysed voters,” he said.
Thousands of papers bundled constituency-wise were kept around him. He took out sheets showing names and the number of times they had appeared.
Pointing at Amit Shah
He pointed a finger at Union Home Minister Amit Shah, showing a newspaper report that stated the Minister had instructed his party workers to increase votes by 10% at every booth.
This was after the dismal performance of the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, during the period between the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha elections.
“The average annual growth rate of voters in India is 0.9%. Between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections, there was a period of five months in between. The average natural growth rate should have been 0.4%. This was their winning strategy in Maharashtra. Amit Shah instructed his cadres in September 2024 in Nagpur that there should be a 10% increase in voters at every booth. On a wholescale level, they registered voters twice. After elections, upon filing an election petition, I decided to look into it. In 2019, I had got 92,296 votes, which increased by 9,130 votes in the 2024 elections. I garnered 1,00,150 votes. And yet, I lost. They have cheated me,” he said.
Published – August 18, 2026 12:20 am IST
