ABP News exit poll bulletin doctored to show 350+ seats for INDIA bloc

by Oishani Bhattacharya

A 23-second clip of what appears to be an ABP News bulletin on exit polls is viral on social media. In the clip, ABP journalist Sandeep Chaudhary can be seen hosting the program as exit poll numbers are displayed on the screen. On top of the screen, one can see that the NDA is predicted to win 152-182 Lok Sabha seats and the INDIA bloc 353-383 seats.

In the clip, the anchor can also be heard saying in Hindi that the INDIA bloc can win 353-383 seats to the disbelief of the NDA.

One should note that the figures are in contrast to the findings of several exit polls, in which the BJP-led NDA is looking at a comfortable victory with more than 350 seats.

Premium subscribed X (formerly Twitter) user A.K. Stalin (@iamAKstalin) tweeted the clip on June 2 asking, “Is this the correct figure? INDIA=353-383 NDA =152-182. Yes or no…?” (Archive)

Several others shared the same clip claiming that this is the correct prediction. Below are a few instances.

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Fact Check

We noticed some discrepancies in the clip like the audio of the clip and the lip movement of the anchor did not match. Additionally, the number of seats predicted for NDA and INDIA has been written in different fonts than the other numbers appearing on the screen. We also noticed a copyright mark at the bottom right corner of the screen that said, ‘Picsart’. Picsart is a photo/video editing platform.

We further noticed that almost every 3-4 seconds the numbers refreshed on the screen except for those on top as the exit poll predictions for each state were being shown, and during these few seconds, almost all the content from the screen disappeared other than the NDA and INDIA seat share numbers.

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We ran a reverse image search on some of the key frames of the clip and came across a tweet from ABP News (@ABPNews) which contained a video with similar a frame as in the viral video, featuring anchor Sandeep Chaudhary. In this clip, the Exit Poll predictions for the NDA and the INDIA bloc are exactly the opposite of what is shown in the viral video.

Below is a comparison of key frames from the viral video and the one shared by ABP News.

We found the entire bulletin on ABP News’ official X handle. There, too, one can clearly see that the exit poll prediction for NDA is 353-383 and that for INDIA 152-182. This data shown on the ABP News program is by CVoter. We found several other news reports of the CVoter exit polls predicting 353-383 seats for NDA and 152-182 for the INDIA bloc.

Hence, it can be concluded that a clip from the original ABP News bulletin has been manipulated to show exit poll figures in favour of the INDIA bloc.

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