(Editor's Note: The story was first published on 4 April 2022 and is being republished in the light of the video circulating with the same claim on social media platforms.)
A video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's public address is doing the rounds on social media, with a claim that he compared ballot papers to Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and favoured papers to the machine for the election process.
In the video, Modi is heard saying, "Brothers and sisters, when educated countries hold elections, they read names and stamp ballot papers even today, even in America."
However, the video has been clipped and taken out of context.
In the original video of PM Modi's public address at Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad in December 2016, he had said that developed nations, despite being literate, still stamped ballot papers to cast their vote.
Expressing pride, he had noted that Indians were better in that aspect, as voters cast their votes using EVMs.
CLAIM
Social media users are sharing the 20-second long clip with the claim that even Prime Minister Narendra Modi favoured a voting system with stamps and ballot papers over EVMs for elections.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We divided the video into multiple frames with the help of InVid, a video verification tool, and ran a reverse image search on some of them.
One of the results on Yandex led us to a tweet dated 3 December 2016 by the Bharatiya Janata Party's verified Twitter account. This tweet was shared with a hashtag in Hindi, which transliterates to '#Parivartan_Mehrauli.'
The photo shared in this tweet closely resembled stills from the claim.
We explored posts shared with this hashtag, and were led to another tweet from the same account on the same day, that contained the link to a 'live' Facebook video on the party's official page.
The section of this address that was clipped and shared. The relevant viral part can be heard at 37:37 minutes into the live video.
Speaking at a public rally in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad ahead of the 2017 Assembly elections in the state, Prime Minister Modi discussed the work his government and party had done for the people's benefit.
He spoke to the audience about how their programmes aimed to electrify over 18,000 villages and reduce poverty and corruption in Uttar Pradesh. The prime minister also noted that due to the changes introduced by their government, an increasing number of Indians were using digital platforms for everyday affairs, such as banking and payments.
Modi then proceeded to say, "Some people say that our country is poor and uneducated, our people don't know anything. But my brothers and sisters, even highly educated countries read names and stamp ballot papers during their elections even today, even in America. But here in India, which you call poor and uneducated, people press buttons and cast their votes."
Towards the end of the address, Modi remarked on how hard work and honesty in poor Indians would take the country forward, and technology would make it easier to do so.
Adding that there are 40 crore smartphones in the country, he said that Indians would adapt quickly to technology as Indians "readily accept development".
Clearly, an edited video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 2016 address in Uttar Pradesh was shared to falsely claim that he favoured ballot papers over EVMs as a system for voting.
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