Rahul Somvanshi
An investigation by The Reporters’ Collective has raised questions about discrepancies in Election Commission of India records for 51 constituencies in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir during the 2024 elections. The Election Commission has rejected the report’s interpretation, saying the figures reconcile when correctly read.
The investigation, published on 10 November 2026, was reported by Sumedha Mittal and Venkatesh Nayak for The Reporters’ Collective, and edited by Furquan Ameen. It analysed records from 530 constituencies and says that, in 32 contests, figures for votes recorded and votes counted did not match; in 19 others, it found nil entries for a field it interpreted as votes polled.
What the investigation examined
The report focuses on election paperwork used to document turnout and votes recorded. Form 17A is the Register of Voters, while Form 17C is the Account of Votes Recorded. Proper reconciliation between the relevant records is a core election-administration safeguard, because it allows officials, candidates and citizens to test whether figures align before results are finalised.
The Reporters’ Collective says the records it accessed required audit and that the reported gaps warranted explanation. Its full methodology, constituency-level findings and source documents should be read alongside this account.
The Election Commission’s response
State-level electoral authorities have disputed the conclusions. Reporting on the response says officials argued that some figures treated as votes polled were in fact registered-elector totals, and that the official poll figures reconcile after postal ballots and relevant adjustments are accounted for. The Commission has rejected the suggestion that the data demonstrate an unaccounted mismatch.
That disagreement is central, not incidental. A numerical inconsistency in a record can arise from a transcription error, an incorrect field interpretation, a missing value, a data-entry problem or a substantive procedural failure. It cannot be resolved responsibly by a headline alone.
What transparency should look like
The public-interest question is straightforward: publish clear, constituency-specific reconciliations that identify the applicable form fields, EVM votes, postal ballots, rejected votes and corrections, alongside the audit trail for each discrepancy. That would let independent experts test both the investigation and the Commission’s explanation.
Election integrity depends not only on procedures being followed, but on records being sufficiently accessible and intelligible for those procedures to be checked.
Investigation credit: “ECI’s Internal Records of 2024 Elections”, reported by Sumedha Mittal and Venkatesh Nayak for The Reporters’ Collective; edited by Furquan Ameen. The submitted Reel by Meygha Srikanth was used as a discovery lead.
