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| - Fact Check: Viral video of EVM burning is not from ongoing Lok Sabha polls
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be misleading. This video or the incident is not from the ongoing Lok Sabha polls but of a by-election that took place in Jammu and Kashmir in 2017.
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India Today Fact Check
The claim is misleading. This video or the incident is not from the ongoing Lok Sabha polls but of a by-election that happened in Kashmir in 2017.
Electronic Voting Machine, popularly known as EVM, has always been a matter of controversy during elections in India. Soon after the first phase of the ongoing Lok Sabha election (April 11), a video went viral on Facebook. In the video, people can be seen smashing an EVM on the ground and then burning it.
Facebook user Imran Cheeku posted this on the same day along with two more screen grabs of the video. The user claimed in Hindi, "Today, the first phase of polling is taking place in India. Polling officials said if you press any button on the EVM, the vote goes to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). People got furious over this and smashed the EVM."
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be misleading. This video or the incident is not from the ongoing Lok Sabha polls but of a by-election that took place in Jammu and Kashmir in 2017.
The archived version of the post can be seen here.
The viral post was shared on Facebook more than 16,000 times at the time of filing this story. Hundreds of comments poured in over the post. Almost all of them believed the narrative and thought that the incident happened during the current election but some people doubted the authenticity of the video.
We sliced up the viral video into keyframes with the help of the Invid verification tool.
Then, using Yandex reverse search on one of the key frames, we found few old web links of several media reports regarding the actual incident.
NDTV and India Today covered the incident and showed the same video clip on April 12, 2017.
The scene captured in the viral clip is from a polling booth in Budgam area of Srinagar parliamentary constituency in 2017. Re-polling was conducted in several of these polling booths after massive violence took place during the by-polls following the poll boycott call by separatists. According to various news reports, 33 EVMs were damaged by angry mobs.
Although some reports of sporadic violence and EVM glitches emerged in the first phase of the ongoing Lok Sabha election at some places in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, the viral video is clearly more than two years old and the claim is also misleading.
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