Old video misrepresented as BJP booth capturing in 2024 general elections - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
April 25, 2024
A video (here, here and here) depicting a woman, seemingly a polling agent, purportedly influencing two women during voting and instructing them to press the EVM button, is circulating widely on social media. The claim accompanying the video asserts that it demonstrates voters being forced to vote in favour of the BJP in the 2024 General elections. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Visuals of a polling agent forcing two voters to vote for BJP in 2024 General elections.
Fact: The video, dating back to at least May 2019, predates the 2024 General elections and is therefore unrelated. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
A reverse image search of the keyframes extracted from the viral video led us to the same video uploaded by multiple people (here and here) in May 2019, including Vinod Sharma (archive), the political Editor of Hindustan Times.
Further research uncovered news reports regarding this issue published by News Central (archive) and Siasat Daily in May 2019. These reports suggest that the incident took place in rural West Bengal during the 2019 General elections. However, no further details were mentioned in these reports.
While we couldn’t independently verify the additional details of the video, the evidence indicates that the viral video predates the 2024 General elections by at least five years. Moreover, FACTLY has previously debunked the same video when it went viral as visuals of booth capture during the 2021 West Bengal elections and the 2019 Huzurnagar by-polls in Telangana.
To sum up, an old video is being shared as BJP doing booth capturing during the 2024 General elections.