The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were announced on 04 June 2024. The BJP-led NDA coalition managed to win 293 seats out of the total 543 parliamentary seats. However, the BJP suffered a major setback, falling short of a majority on its own with only 240 seats, making it dependent on alliance partners to secure the 272 seats required to form the government. The Opposition I.N.D.I.A. bloc, comprising the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP), Trinamool Congress (TMC), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), and their allies, won a total of 234 seats.
The BJP was unable to win a single MP seat in Tamil Nadu. In the Coimbatore parliamentary constituency, BJP state president K. Annamalai lost to DMK’s Ganapathy Rajkumar by a margin of 1,18,068 votes. In this context, a post accompanied by a photo of a vote counting report card purportedly showing Tamil Nadu BJP Chief K. Annamalai receiving only one vote in a particular voting booth in Coimbatore is being widely shared across social media platforms (here, here, & here). Through this article, let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo of a vote counting report card showing that K. Annamalai received only one vote in a booth in the Coimbatore parliamentary constituency in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Fact: This viral photo is edited. In the original photo of the vote counting report card for the first round of counting in the Coimbatore Lok Sabha constituency, it can be seen that 101 votes were recorded for Annamalai in the booth number/EVM number ‘BCUAF 07464’. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Upon carefully observing the vote counting report card shared in the viral photo, we can see that the total number of votes Annamalai received after the first round of counting is 1,852. However, when we add all the votes received by Annamalai table-wise, it gives a tally of 1,752. From this, it is clear that this viral photo has been edited to falsely show that Annamalai received only one vote in a booth.
Subsequently, to gather information about this viral photo, we conducted a Google reverse image search. This search led us to the original photo shared by the Tamil media house Sun News on X (Twitter) on 04 June 2024, stating that the DMK candidate Ganapathi Rajkumar was leading after the first round of vote counting in the Coimbatore Lok Sabha constituency.
Upon further search, we found that in response to one of these viral posts on X (Twitter), Praveen Raj, the social media in charge of Tamil Nadu’s BJP youth wing, called it out as edited and shared the original photo of the vote counting report card for the first round of counting. Additional news reports featuring the vote counting report card for the first round of counting in the Coimbatore Lok Sabha constituency can be found here and here.
In the original photo of the vote counting report card for the first round, it can be seen that 101 votes were recorded for Annamalai in the booth number/EVM number ‘BCUAF 07464’. Upon comparing the viral photo with the original photo, it is evident that the original photo, which shows 101 votes in the booth number/EVM number ‘BCUAF 07464’, has been edited to display only one vote. Below is a comparison of the viral photo with the original photo.
To sum up, an edited photo is being shared falsely claiming that Annamalai received only one vote in a polling booth in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.