Naidu was in Naravaripalle, his native village, to celebrate Makara Sankranti festival with his family members. He later visited TD leader Pulivarthi Nani at the latter's residence in Chandragiri.
Nani recently doused himself with kerosene outside the RDO office, sustaining burn injuries, while demanding deletion of bogus votes registered in the constituency.
Addressing the media after meeting Nani, the TD chief said the widespread voter irregularities being reported from Chandragiri should serve as a case study for the Election Commission.
He slammed the YSRC, saying, “Even dacoits do not dare to indulge in the level and scale of malpractices now being seen across the state.
Naidu expressed surprise that instead of polling officials discharging their constitutional duty, YSRC leaders themselves were illegally enrolling sympathetic voters and deleting the names of TD supporters from electoral rolls.
"What's happening in Chandragiri is a shocking case study of voter fraud and it's the tip of the iceberg. Such bogus registrations are happening across the state," he remarked.
Referring to the EC's recent criticism of Chittoor district collector and SP, the Opposition leader questioned what steps they had taken to prevent the recurrence of irregularities that were seen during the Tirupati Lok Sabha by-poll last year.
The former chief minister said TD leader Nani had been relentlessly fighting for six months against the mass deletion of TD votes in Chandragiri.
"In fact, I'm enormously frustrated seeing the brazen misuse of Form 6, 7 and 8 for voter enrollment in all 11 assembly constituencies of Chittoor district," he said.
Naidu cited examples like the unearthing of bulk addition of those aged between 40 and 80 --but lacking proper documentation --in the voter's list. He said over 13,00 voters were registered with identical photographs, and hundreds of cases of suspicious names have allegedly been detected from different assembly segments.
He held officials allowed such grave electoral irregularities to go unchecked.
Questioning the credibility of the entire electoral process, Naidu accused the YSRC rulers of openly intimidating and misusing the state machinery to cook up the voter lists and steal the 2024 election mandate.
“If necessary, we will not hesitate to approach courts or even launch statewide mass agitations to expose this broad daylight murder of democracy by the government and the YSRC,” the TD chief stated.
