New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi intensified his “vote chori” charge against the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Election Commission, alleging that 25 lakh fake votes were cast in the 2024 Haryana assembly elections.
Speaking at a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday, November 5, Gandhi said his team had found evidence of “systemic manipulation” that turned a Congress victory into defeat. Gandhi presented what he described as “100 percent proof” of large-scale irregularities, claiming that one in every eight voters in Haryana was fake. “Haryana has 2 crore voters, and 25 lakh of them are fake,” he said.
He also alleged that 5.21 lakh duplicate voter entries were discovered, some of which reportedly featured the same photograph used under different names.
In one example shown during the presentation, Gandhi displayed a photograph of a woman that he claimed appeared multiple times in the state’s voter rolls under names such as Seema, Sweety and Saraswati, allegedly casting votes 22 times. The image, he said, illustrated how identities had been duplicated to inflate vote counts.
What Do We Know About The Model?
Screengrabs from the website.
The woman whose image appeared in Gandhi’s presentation is a Brazilian model whose photograph was uploaded to the free stock image platform Unsplash.com by photographer Matheus Ferrero.
The image, titled 'woman wearing blue denim jacket', was first published on March 2, 2017 and has been viewed over 59 million times and downloaded more than 4 lakh times under the Unsplash licence, which allows free public use.
Ferrero’s profile on Unsplash confirms he is a professional photographer. The image was taken using a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS camera and has been featured widely in blogs and online posts unrelated to the Haryana election. There is no suggestion of any involvement by the model or photographer in the alleged voter duplication.
As of now, neither the Election Commission nor the BJP has formally responded to Gandhi’s claims. The matter has raised concerns over electoral transparency and digital data misuse in voter management systems.
