A woman’s shock discovery of nine strangers registered at her flat has ignited a storm over alleged electoral fraud in Thrissur
BY PC Bureau
August 12, 2025 — A storm has broken out in Thrissur, the only Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 general elections, after fresh allegations of “vote chori” (vote theft) emerged. Multiple complaints have surfaced about fake voter registrations using residential addresses without the knowledge or consent of property owners.
The controversy began when Prasanna, a resident of Flat No. 4C, Capital Village Apartments in Poonkunnam, filed a formal complaint alleging that nine strangers were registered as voters at her address. “We are a family of four adults and two children. Only I am registered to vote in Thrissur — the others vote in our ancestral village of Poochinipadam. We have no idea who these nine people are,” she told reporters.
Prasanna said she learned about the fake entries only when approached for verification, and has since submitted a signed complaint to the District Collector.
READ: Om Birla Sets Up Three-Member Panel in Justice Varma Case
CPM workers claim this is not an isolated incident. Allegations of similar irregularities have surfaced in other residential complexes in Poonkunnam, including Water Lily Apartments. They allege that vacant flats were used as fictitious addresses to transfer votes from other districts.
VOTE CHORI IN THRISSUR, KERALA | BJP won its first Lok Sabha seat from Kerala surprising everyone across political spectrum. When you take a deeper look at the data, it becomes obvious how BJP candidate @TheSureshGopi managed to win the seat by manipulating voters list.
Take a… pic.twitter.com/QGtOU3GUCB
— Congress Kerala (@INCKerala) August 10, 2025
“The fact that the real flat owner doesn’t even know these people makes the issue serious,” a CPM local leader said.
Former CPI(M) candidate for Thrissur, VS Sunil Kumar, accused the Election Commission (EC) of allowing “large-scale irregularities” during voter registration. He claimed that in one booth alone, 280 applications arrived together, many belonging to people from other constituencies or migrant workers, facilitated by the EC’s decision to accept postal cards as address proof.
Congress Joins the Offensive
The Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee has also waded into the controversy. In a detailed post on X (formerly Twitter), the party alleged that BJP candidate Suresh Gopi’s victory was engineered through large-scale manipulation of the voters list.
The Congress post highlighted that Thrissur saw an unprecedented surge of 1,46,656 registered voters in 2024, more than double the increase seen in 2019, making it Kerala’s largest constituency with 14.83 lakh voters. “Did Thrissur’s population suddenly explode? No. Large-scale registrations were carried out by the BJP a few months before the elections, often using empty houses and apartment addresses,” the post read, comparing the alleged modus operandi to what Rahul Gandhi recently exposed in Bengaluru.
READ: Storm Brews in Assam as BJP Targets Tribal Land Safeguards
The Congress also accused Suresh Gopi of adding votes for his family members at an address in Thrissur while they were living in Thiruvananthapuram.
Leader of the Opposition VD Satheesan has demanded a full-fledged investigation into the complaints, accusing the BJP of adding votes “in the wrong way” and undermining the democratic process. He praised Rahul Gandhi for spotlighting the issue and urged citizens to resist “fascism, autocracy, and communalism.”
Thrissur’s 2024 victory was historic for the BJP, with actor-turned-politician Suresh Gopi defeating CPI(M)’s VS Sunil Kumar and Congress’s K Muraleedharan, breaking decades of UDF–LDF dominance in the state. But with mounting evidence of voter list manipulation — from suspiciously high voter roll growth to fake registrations at vacant flats — the constituency’s election results may now face unprecedented scrutiny.
