Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav alleged on 14 October 2026 that the BJP relies on fake votes and plans to delete the votes of backward classes, Dalits and minorities in Uttar Pradesh, according to a ThePrint report of his address to party workers at the party headquarters in Lucknow. He urged workers from various districts to remain vigilant ahead of the 2027 Assembly election. These are allegations made by him and the sources reviewed do not confirm them.
The report quotes him as saying that the BJP considers fake votes its strength and that vote theft is a major issue, and that workers should remain vigilant. He said that large-scale irregularities remain in the electoral roll even after the Special Intensive Revision, and that during the revision the BJP conspired to remove the votes of Samajwadi Party supporters.
He cited specific examples. According to the report, the party detected what it called fabricated Form 7 applications seeking deletion of votes for two people: Nandlal Nishad of Sultanpur and Dashrath of Lucknow’s Sarojini Nagar. Form 7 is the form used to object to an entry in the electoral roll or to seek its deletion. The report does not say what the Election Commission found when these cases were checked.
A day later, on 15 October, Uttar Pradesh Minister Om Prakash Rajbhar criticised Akhilesh Yadav over his vote theft allegations against the Election Commission, according to a search summary of a Social News XYZ report. Rajbhar said that Yadav was creating a false narrative because his party would face defeat in the 2027 Assembly elections. The report is described as having appeared during an anti-Election Commission protest, whose details were not reviewed.
Other reports in search results show that Akhilesh Yadav has made similar claims before. Headlines include one about alleging voter list irregularities, another about accusing the Election Commission of vote loot and demanding fast-track action, and another about vote theft in the electoral roll revision. They are older or of uncertain date, and they were not reviewed in detail, so the history of the allegations is not described here.
The sources do not contain responses from the Election Commission or the BJP in the ThePrint article. The ThePrint piece notes that no responses were included, and the only reply reviewed is the Uttar Pradesh minister’s. Readers should check the Election Commission’s statements and the final published rolls for the facts.
The context is the 2027 Uttar Pradesh election. The BJP has 256 MLAs in the present Assembly and the Samajwadi Party has 101, according to figures in a Rajya Sabha seat report, so the SP is the main opposition. The ThePrint article describes the election as critical to the party’s political survival, which is the report’s own characterisation.
IndiaX24 has covered the broader dispute about the electoral roll, including the Special Intensive Revision, the Supreme Court hearings on Form 6 and the row between opposition parties and the Chief Election Commissioner. Those reports, along with the Election Commission’s own data, are the place to look for the verified numbers on deletions and additions, which the sources reviewed here do not give for Uttar Pradesh.
The allegations and the reply show how the electoral roll has become a main issue in the run-up to the 2027 elections, and the final published rolls will test the competing claims.
Featured image: The Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Bhawan in Lucknow (file photo). Photo by Mohammad Azahar, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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