A video of electronic voting machines being set on fire has been viewed tens of thousands of times in Facebook posts that claim the machines were attacked by people angered by vote tampering in the first phase of the ongoing Lok Sabha election. The claim is false; the video actually shows an incident during a 2017 by-election in the city of Srinagar.
The video, which is around 35 seconds long, has been viewed more than 89,000 times in a post published to Facebook April 11, 2019 -- the same day that voting began in the Lok Sabha polls.
The video shows electronic voting machines, or EVMs, being smashed and set on fire by a group of people.
The post’s Hindi-language caption says, translated to English: “Polling is on for the first phase of elections in India, polling officials are saying that votes are going in favour of the BJP despite whatever buttons you push. People smashed EVM out of anger.”
Below is a screenshot of the misleading post, which also contains two stills from the video:
Snapshot of the misleading Facebook post
The video has also been shared elsewhere on Facebook with the same caption, for example in this post also published April 11 and shared nearly 2,000 times since.
It has also been shared on Facebook and Twitter here and on YouTube– all published on or after April 11 – alongside similar claims.
A reverse image search on Yandex using keyframes from the video obtained using digital verification tool InVid found that the clip was not filmed during the first phase of the 2019 Indian election but is two years old.
The exact same video was published in news reports, dated April 12, 2017.
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