SRINAGAR: In nine of Jammu and Kashmir's 2024 election contests, officials wrote "nil" or "0" where they were supposed to record how many voters walked into the polling booths. This is according to the Election Commission of India's own internal records.
Those records were obtained and analysed by The Reporters' Collective (TRC), which published the first part of its "Election Audit" series on Tuesday. TRC did not single out J&K. The figure follows from its own totals. It found 19 seats with a blank walk-in count across the three regions it examined, and it places 10 of them in Maharashtra and Haryana. That leaves nine in J&K, the only other region in the dataset.
The blank entry triggers questions because the walk-in count is the Commission's main safeguard against rigging. At every booth, one polling officer logs each voter in the Register of Voters (Form 17A) before that voter reaches the electronic voting machine (EVM). When polls close, the number of people logged in should equal the number of votes on the machine. A gap between the two is a red flag under the ECI's own rules. It can point to votes added without voters, or voters turned away without voting.
A "nil" entry means that check never happened. TRC says it can mean only two things: either nobody voted, or officials faked the record. In both cases, the result was declared and certified anyway, and no repoll was ordered in any of the nine seats.
The same failure occurred in 10 of the 436 contests held in Maharashtra and Haryana. That is about one seat in 44. In J&K, it was nine seats out of 94 with surviving records, or about one in ten.
In Maharashtra and Haryana, seven of the ten nil seats were won by the BJP or its NDA allies. The nine J&K seats with ‘nil’ walk-in count are: Jammu parliamentary seat, Kishtwar, Jammu North, Shopian, DH Pora, Zainapora, Bandipora, Rafiabad and Karnah.
The political pattern also differs. In Maharashtra and Haryana, seven of the ten nil seats went to the BJP or its NDA allies. In J&K the nine are split: four NC, three BJP, one Congress and one independent.
Three seats were decided by fewer than 1,300 votes: Kishtwar by 521, Bandipora by 811 and Shopian by 1,207. In those three, the record that could have confirmed the count is blank.
TRC published a chart of the five worst cases where EVMs counted more votes than the records show were cast. Four of the five are in J&K. The fifth, Haryana's Kaithal, is in a category of its own, with 1,67,070 extra votes (99% extra).
In each of the four, the excess is smaller than the winning margin. On these figures, none of the gaps could have changed a result. The largest in raw numbers is Srinagar. Its EVMs counted 6,72,942 votes, while the returning officer's report shows 6,66,046 polled.
Srinagar's 2024 turnout of 38.49%, up from 14.43% in 2019, was one of the headline numbers of that election. Both of Waheed Para's 2024 contests appear on the list. He lost Srinagar to Mehdi in May, then won the Pulwama assembly seat that autumn.
The chart shows only the top five of the 20 seats in this category. It is not known if other J&K seats were also affected. TRC has said it will publish the raw data after the series is published.
TRC sought returning officers' reports for 531 constituencies and found 530. The missing one is Devsar in Kulgam district.
Devsar had one of the closest results in the 2024 assembly election. The NC's Peerzada Feroze Ahmad won on debut with 18,230 votes, beating the PDP's Mohammad Sartaj Madni by 840. The report does not explain why the seat's record could not be traced.
TRC emailed four questions to the Commission on October 21, 2026. It asked whether the ECI had examined the returning officers' reports for J&K, Maharashtra and Haryana, and whether it had investigated the mismatches. It also asked how many such cases the ECI had found nationally in 2024, and what action it took on any discrepancies’ officers flagged.
None of the four was answered. On November 5, the ECI's Public Grievance Redressal cell treated the email as a complaint. It asked TRC to supply the state, district and assembly constituency involved, and promised that the details would be kept "safe within the department." TRC says it will not file a grievance and will not deal with the Commission in private.
The ECI's rules allow a small gap between the two counts in only two situations. One is when a voter enters the booth and then declines to vote (Rule 49O). The other is when a presiding officer stops a voter for breaching ballot secrecy (Rule 49M). At constituency level, these usually amount to a handful of votes. Neither explains a blank register or an excess of almost 7,000 votes.
TRC is explicit that its findings are not proof of rigging. Some may turn out to be poor clerical work. Its point is that the Commission's own safeguard failed. A returning officer is supposed to scrutinise these records the day after polling and recommend a repoll if anything is wrong. In the seats TRC flagged, that safeguard either was not applied or was applied to blank paperwork.
TRC's findings arrive at the worst moment for J&K's ruling National Conference since it took office in October 2024. TRC names 13 J&K seats, and the NC won six of them: four of the nil seats, plus Kokernag and Srinagar. It also won Devsar, the seat whose record is missing. The man who won Srinagar has just walked out of the party.
On November 3, Srinagar MP Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi told a gathering in Budgam that he was leaving the NC after 24 years and resigning his Lok Sabha seat. He accused Omar Abdullah and NC president Farooq Abdullah of abandoning the party's 2024 promises on Article 370, reservation and jobs. The resignation takes effect once the Lok Sabha Speaker accepts it.
Mehdi has said he may contest any by-election as an independent. If a by-election is held, Srinagar would vote again while questions remain over its 2024 paperwork.
At the same time, the NC is dealing with a revolt in its own ranks. The rebellion surfaced on October 30 at a meeting at the Srinagar home of MLA Qaiser Jamshaid Lone, three days after Omar Abdullah expanded his cabinet. Reports put the dissident group at 24 to 25 MLAs. Sixteen signed a resolution giving the leadership 14 days to act. They want a new council of ministers chosen on merit; the removal of Omar Abdullah's political adviser, Nasir Aslam Wani; and the removal of some ministers, including Deputy Chief Minister Surinder Choudhary.
Farooq Abdullah met at least 15 of the dissidents at his Gupkar residence on November 6. During the meeting, Omar Abdullah reportedly offered to resign several times. The MLAs turned the offer down, saying their quarrel was with the system around him, not with him. Farooq Abdullah promised committees of MLAs to work alongside each minister, a panel to track manifesto promises including statehood, and a reshuffle within a year. Some dissidents called the outcome a truce rather than a settlement.
The NC holds 41 of the Assembly's 90 seats. With Congress and independents, the government counts about 54 supporters. In July, Omar Abdullah accused the BJP of offering NC legislators Rs 20–30 crore each to defect. The BJP rejected the charge.
The NC has been among the J&K voices against the CEC. It joined the INDIA bloc's Delhi delegation and the Jammu march, and TRC's findings support that campaign. But the records in question cover the election that brought the NC to power. They have come out just as a former MP accuses the party of betraying that mandate and its own MLAs question how it governs.
Across J&K, Maharashtra and Haryana, TRC digitised and checked 4,212 physical records. In 51 of 530 contests, it found that the ECI's records could not rule out bogus voting. In 32 of them, the votes counted did not match the votes polled. 20 had more votes counted than cast, and 12 had fewer. The other 19 had the blank walk-in count.
The largest discrepancies were in the two states. In Mumbai North, Union minister Piyush Goyal's seat, the internal records show 18.11 lakh votes polled, against 10.33 lakh declared. In Haryana's Badkhal, 3.32 lakh votes were recorded as polled, and 1.60 lakh were counted.
Glaringly, in Kaithal, the record shows 215 voters for the whole constituency, yet 1,67,285 votes were counted: 99% increase. In six seats, officials appear to have entered the total number of registered voters as the number of votes polled, which would imply 100% turnout.
These are the records the ECI has worked to keep out of public view. It stopped publishing booth-level data after 2019. In May 2024, it told the Supreme Court that releasing them could lead to "mischief" across the electoral process.
On December 10, 2024, the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered the records and CCTV footage handed over in the Badkhal case. Ten days later, at 10.23 PM, the Centre notified an amendment to the Conduct of Election Rules restricting public access to them.
The findings come as protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar enter their seventh week. The protests began in late September after the Indian Express reported that the other two Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had raised at least 14 objections to decisions in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls.
The SIR has removed more than 130 million names nationally. The ECI says the objections were routine, that final decisions were unanimous, and that voters wrongly removed can register again.
On November 1, Rahul Gandhi and leaders of the INDIA bloc led a march through New Delhi demanding Kumar's resignation. Earlier, on October 10, police blocked Jantar Mantar and detained thousands of people. The Supreme Court has issued notices to the ECI but declined to suspend Kumar.
J&K's parties joined early. J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said the Express report "raises many questions". On October 6, he joined an INDIA bloc delegation that marched to the Commission in Delhi.
The next day, Congress, the NC, the PDP and the CPI(M) marched together in Jammu, with smaller marches in Kathua, Udhampur and Kishtwar. Marchers burnt an effigy of the CEC and read out Article 326, the constitutional guarantee of adult franchise. On October 17, Mahila Congress workers protested in Srinagar.
In J&K, the protests have been tied to demands for the restoration of statehood. Omar Abdullah has also linked them to J&K's 2022 delimitation. In Srinagar on October 7, he said the region had already been manipulated through delimitation and that "the same will likely happen with the SIR."
J&K has not yet had an SIR. On November 5, the ECI said the revision schedule for J&K, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh would be announced later because of winter weather. J&K's rolls were last revised in 2024, the year of the elections TRC has now audited. The BJP calls the protests politically motivated. The Commission has not responded to the J&K parties' statements.
Several key questions remain open:
Whether "Jammu" in TRC's list is the Jammu Lok Sabha seat.
Whether more J&K seats are among the 20 excess-vote and 12 shortfall seats that TRC's charts do not show.
Why Devsar's report is missing.
Whether any J&K returning officer flagged a discrepancy after polling.
How the winners of the 13 named seats, from all four parties and one independent, respond.
TRC's own totals also shifted before publication. Its October 21 email to the ECI cited 52 seats: 34 mismatches and 18 nil counts. The published story gives 51: 32 mismatches and 19 nil counts.
The J&K figure of nine nil seats should be checked against the raw data when TRC releases it.
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