By: Ankita Kulkarni
April 14 2023
Image of ABP-CVoter pre-poll survey result digitally altered to claim BJP will win in the 2023 Karnataka elections
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Fact-Check
The Verdict False
The survey predicted 115-127 seats for Congress and 68-80 for BJP in Karnataka. The count has been interchanged in the digitally altered viral image.
Context
The Indian state of Karnataka is going to polls on May 10, 2023, for 224 Vidhan Sabha seats. Ahead of the elections, it is common practice for news channels and other organizations to conduct pre-poll surveys in the states to predict the mood of the people. However, lately, these survey results have also become a source of misinformation. One post on Twitter includes an image of a news bulletin broadcasting the C-Voter (Centre for Voting Opinion & Trends in Election Research) survey. The said bulletin forecasts that in the 2023 Karnataka assembly elections, BJP will gain 115-127 seats, Congress will get 68-80, JDS (Janata Dal (Secular)) 23-35, and others will win 0-2 seats. The post has over 319,100 views on Twitter so far.
In Fact
On analyzing the image carefully, Logically Facts checked whether ABP News, which is an Indian Hindi news channel, indeed published or broadcast such a bulletin. We searched with the keyword “ABP News C-Voter Karnataka election” and found an article published by ABP News on March 29, 2023, on the survey. It clearly notes, “ABP-CVoter Karnataka Opinion Poll has projected 115-127 seats for the Congress, 68-80 seats for the BJP, and 23-35 seats for the JD(S).”
The same article also includes ABP News’s Twitter post, which contained the video of the broadcast where it live-streamed the survey results. The thumbnail of the video shows the original bulletin displaying the survey results; ‘BJP 68-80 and Congress 115-127’ seats.
This makes it clear that the predicted seat count of the BJP and Congress has been interchanged and made viral with false claims. The other counts of the BJP and Congress that were displayed on the right and left side during the bulletin have also been edited in the viral image.
The original ABP C-Voter results published by The Quint and shared by several Twitter users do not show the count as claimed in the viral tweet. This proves that the numerical prediction in the viral image has been altered.
The Verdict
An edited image is being circulated to falsely claim that a pre-election poll has predicted a majority win for BJP in the poll-bound Karnataka. Therefore, we mark this claim false.