Fact Check: Muslim minor girl’s voting video is not linked to UP by-polls

A viral video from May 2024 is doing rounds on social media, which shows a minor girl trying to vote in Sambalpur constituency with a voter slip of an older woman.

Credit: Factly

In the wake of the Uttar Pradesh by-elections held on 20 November 2024, a video (here, here, and here) that allegedly shows a Muslim minor girl caught while trying to cast her vote is doing the rounds on social media. In the video, people ask the girl about her age and who sent her to the polling booth to cast her vote. We check the veracity of this claim through this article.

Claim: Viral video shows a minor girl caught attempting to vote during the recent (November 2024) Uttar Pradesh by-election.

Fact: This video is from May 2024. It was reportedly filmed during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections when a minor girl attempted to vote in a polling booth of Kundarki, Sambalpur constituency, with a voter slip of an older woman. Hence, the claim made in the post is misleading.

An archived version of this post can be found here.

To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the viral video. It led us to a few Facebook posts (here and here) from May 2024, which contained the same video. These posts described the viral video as an incident that occurred in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambalpur, where a minor girl was caught trying to vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Taking this as a hint, we performed a keyword search leading us to news reports (here, here, and here) from May 2024 about the viral video. As per these reports, a minor girl was caught while she attempted to vote using the vote slip of a 40-year-old woman. 

This incident happened in the Kundarki Assembly constituency of Sambhal during the third phase of polling in the Sambhal Lok Sabha constituency during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. As per the reports (here and here), a case was registered against three people in this regard, including the child’s father. This evidence makes it clear that this incident did not happen during the recent (November 2024) UP by-elections but during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections held in May 2024.

To sum up, a video from May 2024 is falsely shared as a recent incident of fake voting in the UP by-elections held in November 2024.  

This story was originally published by Factly as part of the Shakti Collective. Apart from the headline, excerpt and introduction, this story has not been edited by ThePrint staff.