The Congress government in Karnataka has ordered the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to investigate alleged illegal attempts made in the 2022-23 period to delete the names of 6,018 voters in the Aland assembly constituency in Kalaburagi.The constitution of the SIT comes in the wake of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi citing the Aland case as an example of vote theft with the tacit consent of the Election Commission of India (ECI).In an order issued on Saturday, the Karnataka home department stated that it “has decided that it is appropriate to constitute a Special Investigation Team of the CID comprising in the case registered at the Aland Police Station, Kalaburagi District in connection with the unauthorized exclusion of voters from the electoral roll…”The SIT is to be headed by senior IPS officer B K Singh, who is in-charge of the CID economic offences and special investigation units.The SIT has also been mandated to conduct a “comprehensive investigation of other cases that may be registered in other police stations of the state in connection with the said criminal case.” Moreover, the SIT has been declared a police station under Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS).The assistant commissioner for Kalburagi and returning officer for Aland, Mamatha Kumari, filed a police complaint at the local Aland police station on February 21, 2023, against unknown persons under Indian Penal Code sections for impersonation, providing false information, and forgery over attempts to illegally delete 6,018 names from the Aland voter list during a revision exercise ahead of the 2023 Karnataka Assembly polls.A booth level officer (BLO) in Aland had detected the alleged illegal attempts to remove names from voter lists during the physical verification process of deletion requests filed online.Story continues below this adA ground-level verification by election officials – at the instance of the ECI and the district commissioner – revealed that 6,018 names were sought to be deleted through remote applications across 254 election booths in Aland, and out of those 6,018 voters, only 24 were found to be living outside.According to the FIR, unknown persons “have used multiple mobile phones to place online applications for deletion of names of voters without the consent or knowledge of the voters.” Visits to the homes of several persons whose names were sought to be deleted revealed that the applications were filed without the knowledge of the voters, states the FIR.Since the investigations involve cyber forensics and the use of mobile phone and mobile apps to generate logins to ECI apps and apply for deletions, the CID unit of the Karnataka Police, which was handed the probe in December 2023, had sought technical data from the ECI for app usage which is believed to reside on servers under the control of the ECI or agencies contracted by the EC.Rahul Gandhi has accused the ECI of shielding suspects involved in “vote theft” by failing to comply with requests of the Karnataka CID to provide data after an initial compliance in September 2023 for data requests.Story continues below this ad“ERO, 46-Aland received 6,018 applications in Form 7 which were submitted online using various apps such as NVSP, VHA, GARUDA apps during December 2022. Suspecting the genuineness of such a large number of applications submitted online for deletion of electors names in 46-Aland LAC in Karnataka, verification of each application was conducted by ERO/AERO/BLOS,” the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) said in a statement on Thursday.“Based on instructions given by ECI, the CEO, Karnataka has handed over to Superintendent of Police, Kalaburagi district on 06.09.2023 all the available information with ECI for completing the investigation,” the office of the Karnataka CEO said in the statement.“The shared information includes objector’s details, including form reference number, name of the objector, his EPIC number and mobile number used for log-in and mobile number provided by the Objector for processing, software application medium, IP address, applicant place, Form submission date and time, and user creation date,” the CEO said.“Someone ran an automated program that ensured the first voter of the booth was the applicant. The same person used a cell phone from outside the state to fill out the deletion application. We are pretty certain that this was done in a centralised manner and at scale. It was not done at a worker level but at a call centre level,” Rahul Gandhi has alleged.