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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.

5,413 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYElections & voting

Video of Yogi Adityanath waving at people while standing on a bulldozer during a campaign event

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a video said to show Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath standing on a moving bulldozer and waving to people during a campaign event. FACTLY reports that the video instead shows a Durga Puja religious procession in Narhan village, in the Raghunathpur subdivision of Bihar’s Siwan district. The person on the bulldozer was an artist portraying Adityanath, not the chief minister.

FACTLYElections & voting

Procession following Congress victory in Telangana during which individuals replaced the Ashoka Chakra on the tricolor with Islamic phrases (Kalma)

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim links a procession in which Islamic phrases allegedly replaced the Ashoka Chakra on the Indian flag to Congress’s victory in Telangana. FACTLY’s review says the footage does show people waving a tricolor with Islamic phrases in place of the Chakra, but finds that the claimed political and electoral connection is wrong: it identifies the procession as a June 2022 protest in Mahbubnagar, Telangana, prompted by comments about Prophet Mohammed by then-suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma. To trace the clip, the review says the viral excerpt showed journalist Sudhir Chaudhary reporting on the footage. Searches using relevant keywords led the reviewers to what they describe as the original report on Zee News’s official YouTube account, broadcast live on 10 June 2022. FACTLY also says news agencies had reported on the footage at the time and that its search found no reports linking the protest to Congress. Its account places the protest under a BRS-led state government, not a Congress-led one. The timing rules out the post’s attribution to the later election result: the review states that Telangana’s election results were announced on 03 December 2023, with Congress victorious, while the footage originated in June 2022. The review says it found no reports of such processions after Congress’s victory. Thus, the video depicts the flag imagery described in the claim, but the evidence presented does not support saying that the procession followed, or was connected to, Congress’s electoral victory.

FACTLYElections & voting

Video shows women partying after the BJP won the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections 2023

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerned a video of women eating and socializing that was circulated as footage of celebrations after the BJP won the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections. FACTLY’s review compared the video’s online history with the election timeline: polling took place on 17 November, and results were declared on 3 December. The review says the video was already available online by at least 23 October, before either event, so it could not depict a celebration of the results. To investigate the video’s provenance, FACTLY reports conducting reverse image searches on keyframes. That search led to YouTube uploads of the same footage from October and November 2023. One upload, on the channel Banjara Ashwitha, was dated 25 October and described as “Dasara Dawath,” meaning a feast arranged to celebrate Dasara. The review also notes that the video’s background song is in Telugu and that most videos on the channel are in Telugu. FACTLY says Dasara fell on 23 October in 2023, making a Dasara gathering in Telangana a possible context for the footage. It presents that explanation as a likelihood, not a confirmed identification of where or when the video was filmed. The decisive evidence for rejecting the election claim is the footage’s documented availability before the Madhya Pradesh results were announced.