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| - Fact Check: 3-yr-old vote tampering video from Lok Sabha election resurfaces during UP polls
While the voters of 54 Assembly constituencies across 9 districts are set to cast their mandate in the last phase of UP polls on Monday, a video of vote tampering has gone viral on social media. India Today AFWA probes the truth.
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India Today Fact Check
This is a 3-year-old incident that happened during the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections in Uttar Pradesh’s Chandauli district. It has nothing to do with the ongoing UP polls.
The seventh and last phase of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election will be held on March 7. While the voters of 54 Assembly constituencies across 9 districts are set to cast their mandate, a video of vote tampering has gone viral on social media.
In the video, a youth named Virendra Kumar alleged that BJP workers were putting inks on voters’ fingers. People are bribed with money and asked not to cast their votes. He also revealed the names of the BJP workers involved.
In the later part of that video, a middle-aged man in a white shirt can be heard accusing BJP candidate Mahendra Pandey and his men of looting votes in villages by bribing. Towards the end, an elderly lady also claimed the same.
This video has been shared with a sarcastic Hindi caption that translated to, “World’s largest democracy.”
! pic.twitter.com/6cDlBTiO3q— Om Thanvi (@omthanvi) March 4, 2022
Many social media users have retweeted this video along with the hashtags of the UP election.
#UPElections2022 @ECISVEEP let there be democracy in India for God sake!! https://t.co/rD6Y5EpAT2— Shaan (@mdshaan) March 5, 2022
Archived versions of similar claims can be seenhereandhere.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the posts to be misleading. The incident happened nearly three years ago and has nothing to do with the ongoing Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls.
AFWA Probe
It can be noticed that not a single person in the video wore masks. Even the policeman who appeared in frame around the 1-minute mark was without one. This gave us the hint that the video could be from the pre-pandemic era.
Therefore, we ran a couple of keyword searches to find out the time and place of this incident.
This took us to a video report published by The Economic Times during the Lok Sabha polls on May 19, 2019. “Residents of Tara Jivanpur village allege BJP men forcefully applied ink,” the headline read. According to the report, the incident took place in Uttar Pradesh’s Chandauli district.
As the logo of News18 was visible in the video, we searched for a television report of the same. We found the video report published by the website on May 19, 2019. It stated that the people of a Dalit-dominated slum in Chandauli’s Tarajivanpur village alleged BJP workers of bribing them. The residents were given Rs 500 each in exchange for not voting. The party workers also put ink on their fingers.
Uttar Pradesh Police’s official Fact Check handle debunked the claim on March 5.
2019 @chandaulipolice
#UPPViralCheck#UPPolice https://t.co/G0EYqwou3L https://t.co/C16iKsnaj3 pic.twitter.com/pEHaAf6jSS— UPPOLICE FACT CHECK (@UPPViralCheck) March 5, 2022
Therefore, it is clear that a three-year-old video has wrongly been circulated at the time of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election to mislead people.
(With Inputs from Yash Mittal in New Delhi)
READ: Fact Check: Did SAD's Sukhbir Singh Badal seek Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s support in assembly polls?
WATCH: Fact Check Video: Did PM Modi preach ‘divide and loot’ to BJP workers?
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