A video showing police personnel escorting two burqa-clad women out of a space is being shared on social media, amid the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections.
The claim: The video is being shared with text in Hindi, which claims that it shows the Madhya Pradesh police dealing with fake voters.
(Archives of more claims can be seen here and here.)
The truth: The video dates back to February 2022 and shows Rampur police dealing with burqa-clad women who reportedly attempted to commit voter fraud during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.
How did we find out?: Using InVID, a video verification extension on Google Chrome, we divided the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search.
This led us to a post on X, dated 15 February 2022, which mentioned that it showed visuals from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh.
Taking a cue from this, we looked for news reports related to the incident.
We came across several news reports by Hindi news organisations (links here and here), which mentioned that two burqa-clad women were caught while attempting to cast 'fake votes' during the second phase of polling for the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.
The duo, who were later found to be mother and daughter, had attempted to cast votes multiple times at the booth in GRPG College (Government Raza PG College) in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, reported Live Hindustan.
One of them had been successful in casting a fake vote, the District Election Officer Ravindra Kumar told the publication, adding that the two women were identified as Muskaan and Rani.
Kumar warned others not to attempt to do the same, as polling personnel were trained for it, as per Dainik Bhaskar. He said that a case would be registered against both women.
A total of eight people, including these two women, were found to be committing electoral fraud during the second phase of polling in the state.
The Quint has reached out to Rampur police and will update this story as and when we receive a response.
Conclusion: An old video from Uttar Pradesh is being shared to falsely claim that it shows two burqa clad women casting 'fake votes' in the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections.
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