The first phase of the Lok Sabha elections 2024 ended, and as India gears up for the second phase, which is scheduled for 26 April 2024, a video (here, here and here) of police allegedly catching fake voters who came to vote in burqas is doing the rounds on social media. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of police catching fake voters who came in burqa to vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Fact: This is an old video from 2022 of an incident that took place in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur during the 2022 assembly elections. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we conducted a reverse image search on the viral video’s keyframes, which led us to social media posts (here (archive) and here) from February 2022 that featured the same video. These posts described the video as depicting an incident in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur, where police caught burqa-clad women attempting bogus voting and arrested them during the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections of 2022.
Further verification through keyword searches on the internet revealed several news reports (here, here, and here) from February 2022 detailing an event in Rampur during the state’s assembly elections. According to these reports, two women named Muskaan and Rani were apprehended for casting fake votes, with one managing to cast one fake vote successfully. The incident occurred at the GRPG College polling centre in Rampur, leading to the police registering a case against the offenders.
Moreover, it’s important to note that the source of the viral video dates back to 2022, clearly indicating that it is an old video being circulated with a false narrative linking it to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
To sum up, this viral video purportedly depicting police apprehending fake voters during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is an old 2022 video from Uttar Pradesh.
