Video Showing Modi Supporting Ballots Over EVM At A Rally Is Cropped

A video showing Prime Minister Narendra Modi giving a speech, and purportedly saying that educated countries use ballot papers, while uneducated people in India cast votes through EVMs, is being shared on social media with the claim that Modi preferred ballot papers over EVM before he came to power in 2014.

BOOM found this claim to be false; the viral clip has been cropped from a speech given by Modi at Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad in December 2016 - after he came to power as prime minister. Furthermore, a longer version of the clip shows Modi praising India's use of EVMs and criticises the countries that still use ballot papers.

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"Our country is poor, our people are illiterate that they don’t know anything. Brothers and sisters, when an election takes place in educated countries, ballot papers are still used for elections even today. There, the voters read the names on ballot papers and then put a stamp on them, even in America," he can be heard saying in the viral post.

The video was shared with the caption, "Elections should be conducted using ballot papers rather than EVMs. Even the people of America use ballot paper not EVMs. —Narendra Modi before 2014."

Click here to view the post, and here to view an archive.

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2016 Speech - Cropped To Mislead

BOOM did a few keyword searches to find instances of Modi speaking of ballot papers and EVMs, and found that the clip going viral was taken from a speech he gave in UP's Moradabad on December 3, 2016.

We found the entirety of speech on Modi's official YouTube channel, and the cropped portion of the speech can be see at the 55.10 mark.

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Listening to the longer version of the speech, we found that Modi was criticising those who call Indians illiterate, and instead praises India's use of technology while citing the example of EVMs used for casting votes as opposed to ballot papers being used in other countries - where he gives the example of the United States.

Furthermore, the speech was made in 2016 - after Modi came to power as prime minister, which disproves the claim that the speech was made before 2014.