Fact Check: Discredited Video of Polling Agent’s Influence in 2024 Lok Sabha Polls

A video that has been widely shared on social media sites appears to show a woman working as a poll worker supposedly swaying the votes of two women. The popular film has been linked to the Lok Sabha elections that are still going on.

Users shared the video with comments that made it sound like the voters were forced to vote for the BJP.

As part of its review, it found that a video from 2019 that made false claims about being new was shared on social media.

Claim

On April 23, a Facebook user posted a video of what they said was a voting agent influencing two women while they were voting. They said it had something to do with the Lok Sabha elections that were going on at the time.

The picture’s text said, “पसे लोगा 400 पार.” It said in English that “400 will be crossed like this” in the description.

Investigation

To begin the investigation, the Desk used the InVid Tool Search to look through the movie and found several keyframes. When the Desk ran one of the keyframes through Google Lens, it found several posts that had the same video and made similar claims.

These kinds of Facebook posts can be seen here, here, and here, and the links to their old posts can be found here, here, and here.

You can look at two of these X posts here and here, and you can look at old links here and here.

The Desk then looked through the search results and found another X post from May 15, 2019, by Vinod Sharma, who is the Political Editor at Hindustan Times.

“Another accomplishment #ElectionCommission” was written under the picture. Not to mention shocking.

Desk did a custom keyword search on Google to look through the search results some more and found a YouTube movie posted by the official Siasat Daily channel.

“A video filmed inside a polling booth showed a woman polling agent trying to influence voting in West Bengal,” the May 18, 2019 listing for the video said.

The Desk saw that this video was the same one that was recently shared on social media. Here’s a picture that compares the looks of the two videos:

The Desk also looked for where the video came from but couldn’t find any reports on the event. But it was proven that the video was from at least 2019 and was shared as new, which was not true.

CLAIM

A video of a woman poll worker trying to sway people in the Lok Sabha elections that are still going on.

FACT

It is said that the video is from West Bengal and goes back to at least 2019.

CONCLUSION

A number of people on social media shared a video of a woman poll worker supposedly swaying the votes of two women. The captions of the videos suggested that this was how the BJP planned to win more than 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections that are still going on. The Desk’s research showed that the video was from West Bengal and had been made at least in 2019. On social media, the film was shared with false claims.