As the polling for the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections ended, a video of police taking two burkha-clad women into their custody for allegedly trying to cast fake votes is being shared on social media. Let’s verify this claim through this fact-check article.
Claim: Video shows police taking two women into their custody for casting fake votes in the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections.
Fact: This is an old video from 2022 filmed in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur. It has nothing to do with Madhya Pradesh elections. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To learn more details about the viral clip, we performed a reverse image search on a few of its keyframes leading us to a few social media posts (here and here) from February 2022 which contained the same video. The video was described as an incident that happened in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur, “Police in Rampur caught Burqa clad women in an attempt of bogus voting, beaten &. Arrested on the spot. #UPElections2022” read the post’s description.
To confirm this, we performed a keyword search on the Internet which led us to several news reports (here, here, and here ) from February 2022 which reported about an event that took place in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur during the state’s assembly elections.
Reportedly, two women identified as Muskaan and Rani, were caught while casting fake votes. One of them even successfully cast a fake vote. This incident happened in the GRP college polling centre in Rampur. The police even registered a case against them.
Further to check if any such incidents have been reported during the recently held 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, we found a news report on a woman who cast a fake vote in Ujjain but we did not find any news reports of two burkha-clad women casting fake votes. In any case, the source for the viral video is also from 2022 much before the 2023 MP elections, which makes it clear that an old video is being shared with a false narrative linking it to the MP elections.
To sum up, an old video from Uttar Pradesh is falsely shared as visuals of police catching fake voters in Madhya Pradesh.
