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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Elections & voting fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about elections & voting. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

5,414 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYElections & voting

Photo of BJP’s presidential candidate Draupadi Murmu with Mohan Bhagwat at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The review examines a photograph shared as showing BJP presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu visiting RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. It says the image circulated after lawyer Prashant Bhushan posted it with that description on Twitter, and was later shared on Facebook. The review reports that Bhushan deleted his post and apologized to Murmu. Its conclusion is that the photograph was altered and does not establish that the alleged meeting took place. To investigate, the review says it found no official media reports confirming a meeting at the Nagpur headquarters and performed a reverse image search on a cropped version of the circulated picture. It identified two separate images used to create the composite. One showed Murmu with Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren at Raj Bhavan; the other showed Bhagwat at an RSS event in Karnavati, Gujarat. The review says Murmu’s image was embedded into the second picture and flipped horizontally, making the resulting photograph misleadingly appear to show the two together. The source images have distinct settings and provenance: Soren shared the Murmu image in connection with a December 2020 meeting at Raj Bhavan, while the RSS posted the Bhagwat image for a March 2022 meeting in Karnavati. This evidence supports the review’s finding that the circulated picture was a composite, rather than documentation of the claimed visit to Nagpur.

Vera FilesElections & voting

In the May 9 elections, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. got the "biggest electoral mandate in history of Philippine democracy.".

Publisher’s rating: Needs context

Related reporting discusses Marcos Jr.’s May 2022 presidential election result, but it does not verify the exact phrase “biggest electoral mandate in history of Philippine democracy.” A BizNewsAsia article says that Marcos “won 31.6 million votes—the greatest number of votes ever won by a presidential winner” and gives that total as 58.77% of votes cast. This supports a narrower claim about the record number of votes received by a presidential winner; it does not, on its own, establish that his was the largest mandate by every possible measure or across the whole history of Philippine democracy. The article also says Marcos was the first presidential winner since 1969 to receive a majority of total votes cast, contrasting his result with named previous winners’ smaller vote shares. These are the article’s reported comparisons, not evidence here of a separate historical review or of how “mandate” was defined. The supplied research excerpts contain no Vera Files review text, election records, or independent corroboration with which to assess the broader wording further.

BuzzFeed JapanElections & voting

「岸田首相、総裁選での公約を全部削除」と参院選前に拡散した画像

Publisher’s rating: ミスリード

The image circulated ahead of Japan’s 10 July 2022 upper house election with wording that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had deleted all the pledges he made during the Liberal Democratic Party leadership race. The review found that it was not about the current upper house election: it reused a comparison image concerning the party’s pledges for the October 2021 lower house election. It reportedly showed a scene from BS-TBS’s program “Hōdō 1930,” and had already circulated online at the time. The review distinguishes the image’s original point from the misleading impression created by recirculating it without identifying its 2021 election context. It says that some of Kishida’s headline policies announced during the September 2021 leadership race were indeed not mentioned in the party’s October lower house election platform. But the article also checked what happened to those policies afterward, drawing on government policy documents, press-conference statements and reporting, and compared them with the 2022 upper house election platform. That comparison found a mixed record, not a simple story that every pledge had vanished. For example, the review says the later “doubling asset income” plan and measures related to education support appeared in the 2022 platform, while stronger taxation of financial income remained under discussion and was not mentioned there. It also describes other pledges as implemented, altered or still under consideration. The image therefore referred to an earlier election’s platform, and presenting it before the 2022 vote without that context could lead viewers to mistake it for evidence about the current platform.