Video From 2019 Viral As Booth Capturing In Uttar Pradesh Elections

An old video showing a polling agent voting on behalf of women at a polling centre, is being shared on social media with captions claiming that the incident is from the ongoing Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh.

The video was also tweeted, and later deleted, by Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav with a caption claiming the incident took place at a polling booth in Kunda, UP.

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BOOM found that the video is from 2019 and the alleged booth agent was casting illegal votes in Haryana's Faridabad.

The viral video shows a man walking to the voting compartment thrice and voting on behalf of three women voters.

SP president Akhilesh Yadav tweeted the video with a Hindi caption translating to 'The election observers should take note of this incident in Kunda where an unwanted person is openly pressing the vote buttons on behalf of women voters at a polling booth. The observers should appeal to the election commission to cancel the election at Kunda. Identify the person and arrest him immediately'.

(Hindi: कुंडा में जिस तरह बूथ पर उपस्थित किसी दल के अवांछित व्यक्ति द्वारा सरेआम महिलाओं के वोटों का बटन दबाया जा रहा है, उसके वीडियो का संज्ञान लेते हुए चुनाव पर्यवेक्षक चुनाव आयोग से कुंडा का चुनाव रद्द करने की अपील करें। साथ ही दोषी व्यक्ति को चिन्हित कर तत्काल गिरफ़्तार करवाएं।)

While Yadav deleted his tweet, the video was shared by multiple social media users with the same caption.

The video has been shared from several Facebook pages too.

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Another caption with the same video claims that the polling agent voting on behalf of the women is associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Video From Haryana

BOOM had debunked the video earlier when it was viral during the Bihar elections in November 2020.

On doing a reverse image search on a key-frame of the video, we found an NDTV news report showing the same video.

The report stated that the video was from Asaoti in Faridabad, Haryana from May 2019. According to the report, a polling agent was caught on video illegally casting votes thrice. An excerpt from the bulletin states that the polling agent was arrested for trying to influence the voters and booth capturing.

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A report published in Quint stated that the man, a BJP polling agent, was accused of directing the voters to choose BJP by pressing the lotus symbol. He was identified as Giriraj Singh and was arrested.

We also found a tweet from the official handle of District Election Officer, Faridabad dated May 12, 2019 stating that the person in the video had been arrested.

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Kunda MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh on March 1 shared a screenshot of Yadav's tweet with a Hindi caption calling him out for sharing the old video.