No, Sundar Pichai Did Not Cast His Vote from TN for 2019 LS Polls

A picture of Sundar Pichai from two years ago went viral, falsely claiming that he cast his vote in Tamil Nadu.

The viral post falsely claimed that Google CEO Sundar Pichai voted from Tamil Nadu.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint) 

CLAIM

A post showing Google CEO Sundar Pichai casting his vote for the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Tamil Nadu has been making rounds on social media .

The post was shared by a Twitter user with the caption, “Google CEO, @sundarpichai has casted his vote. #TNElection2019 #OruviralPuratchi”. It subsequently went viral, shared by a lot of Twitter users . The post has now been deleted after a lot of users called out the fake information the post carried.

The post which claimed that the Google CEO has casted his vote from Tamil Nadu(Photo:Screenshot from Twitter )

The picture was also tweeted out by TV9 Gujarati, a Gujarati news channel.

Screenshot of a viral Twitter post claiming that the Google CEO voted from Tamil Nadu.(Photo: Screenshot from Twitter )

The picture has been shared widely on Facebook with a similar context.(Photo:Screenshot from Facebook)

True or False?

On doing a reverse image search, The Quint found that the picture with the viral post was a two-year old picture of Sundar Pichai from his visit to his alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur (IITK) in West Bengal.

The picture in the viral post had been shared from his visit on his official Twitter handle on 7 January 2017.

Reverse search image showed that the image was from Pichai’s IIT visit (Photo: Screenshot from Google)

The tweet tweeted by Pichai from his visit, from where the picture was taken.(Photo: Screenshot from Twitter )

It was found that even though the Google CEO was born in Tamil Nadu, he holds the citizenship of The United States of America, according to a Livemint article.

Since India doesn't permit foreign nationals to cast their vote in any Indian election, it is not possible for Sundar Pichai to cast his vote from Tamil Nadu in the 2019 Lok Sabha election .

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