From ‘Vote Chori’ to SIR: How Voter Fear Drove Misinformation Cycles in 2025
The year 2025 will be remembered for how misinformation reshaped the public’s relationship with the ballot.
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Before the first vote was even cast in Bihar, mistrust had already taken root online. Allegations of 'vote chori' following Rahul Gandhi’s press conference and confusion surrounding the Election Commission’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive sparked a nationwide misinformation spiral. This caused panic among voters in Bihar, spilled into West Bengal, and echoed across other states, chipping away at trust in the electoral process itself.
On 24 June, the ECI announced the schedule for Bihar’s SIR, describing it as a routine administrative exercise, conducted after 22 years, aimed at removing ineligible voters and enrolling newly eligible ones.
In August 2025, Tejashwi Yadav, Bihar’s Leader of the Opposition and a senior leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), alleged that his name had been deleted from the state’s electoral rolls during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, which the Election Commission of India denied.
In this climate of distrust, by the second half of the year, these anxieties had intersected with a broader national narrative.
What Themes Did We See?
Allegations of vote chori (theft) had entered political discourse after Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission of colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in committing voter fraud.
This gradually shifted focus toward voter exclusion, with misinterpreted documents and clipped videos circulating widely across platforms.
Team WebQoof analysed 28 fact-check stories published between 15 July and 25 November to track the misinformation that went viral during this year's election cycle and found that videos dominated the disinformation narratives during the polls.
Misinformation unfolded in three distinct phases:
Claims targeting Vote chori allegations raised by Rahul Gandhi
Bihar's SIR confusion during assembly elections
Nationwide SIR panic, which emerged as a secondary trend, particularly in West Bengal, where voter list fears merged with immigration narratives.
This report examines how election-related misinformation evolved throughout 2025 from vote chori allegations to SIR confusion. It answers key questions:
How did misinformation narratives about vote chori intertwine with SIR through the year?
Which claims were shared the most to spread election misinformation?
How did misinformation manifest differently across Bihar, West Bengal, and other states?
How Vote Chori Fueled the First Wave of Election Misinformation
For much of 2025, especially between between August and November, claims of vote chori and those trying to oppose the allegations raised by Gandhi dominated election-related misinformation. While the allegations circulated within mainstream political discourse, it was on social media that the narrative gained traction, often untethered from verifiable evidence.
We classified the 13 fact-checks into three viral categories based on the aspects of India's electoral system they targeted.
Category 1 — Voter Roll Manipulation
The most widely shared claims were related to voter list manipulation & fake voter registrations. These claims alleged fake names were being added and real voters were being removed from electoral rolls.
Allegations that voter rolls were being tampered with, accounted for six of 13 vote chori-related fact-checks.
Sample this: A morphed screenshot purporting to be from The Wire went viral on 13 October, claiming Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the ECI to add "a million fake voters across various constituencies in Bihar".
The screenshot was widely shared by different users across social media platforms.
Other fabricated examples included:
fake voter IDs with actress names
claims of 50 voters in Varanasi sharing the same father’s name
fabricated quotes attributing Rahul Gandhi saying “children’s names were being deleted”
Fact-check story on fake voter IDs with actress names.
(Photo: The Quint)
Category 2 — EVM Manipulation Claims
The second category consisted of claims around electronic voting machines being rigged or that vote counts were being manipulated dominated the narrative around vote chori.
We identified four such fact-checks between September and November 2025.
For instance, a Facebook user posted that Bihar had recorded more votes than voters in its Assembly elections. It cited Election Commission data, claiming "7.42 crore total voters and 7.45 crore votes cast with 66.91 percent turnout."
The post was seen by more than eleven thousand users.
Category 3 — AI-Generated Videos & Fake Statements
The third category consists of false statements attributed to political leaders. We identified three fact-checks that contained manipulated videos and AI-generated content targeting political figures.
An edited clip of Prime Minister Modi interacting with children was manipulated to show them accusing him of vote chori.
This misinformation ecosystem was strengthened and reorganised with the announcement of the SIR, giving existing suspicions a new boost.
In the weeks following the announcement, accounts supporting the Opposition increasingly portrayed the exercise as an extension of alleged electoral manipulation, claiming that legitimate voters were being removed from voter rolls.
At the same time, pro-government accounts amplified a parallel narrative, particularly in the context of West Bengal, linking voter list revisions to the identification and removal of Bangladeshi immigrants, despite the absence of evidence to support such claims.
Bihar at the Intersection of Two Crises
As expected, we saw a lot of election misinformation around the 2025 Bihar elections, accounting for 11 of the 28 fact-checks (39 percent).
Even before vote chori dominated headlines, Bihar was already being targeted with false claims designed to polarise voters and undermine trust in the electoral process.
We identified seven such fact-checks between July and November.
Misinformation broke down into three types:
Communal/identity-based rumours
Eg. a fake claim that Amit Shah said BJP doesn’t give tickets to Muslims.Foreign videos repurposed as Bihar protests
Eg. a clip from Indonesia shared as anti-BJP protests in Bihar.Fake manifestos and policy claims
Eg. claims Mahagathbandhan promised to legalise beef.
Fact-check on a clip from Indonesia shared as anti-BJP protests in Bihar.
(Photo: The Quint)
Overlapping with general election misinformation, 4 additional fact-checks specifically linked Bihar to vote chori allegations.
For example: An old clip of actor Raveena Tandon meeting Tejashwi Yadav from 2024 was falsely linked to Bihar's 2025 polls. The post reached over two lakh users.
Why Bihar? The state's vulnerability to misinformation stemmed from the high-stakes Assembly elections which carried political weight.
The SIR announcement coincided with the ECI's voter list revision announcement, which happened approximately four months before the election.
The Quint reached out to Yashwant Deshmukh, a political analyst and founder of CVoter, to learn more about the ECI's SIR process.
The SIR process, which began in June 2025, resulted in over 60 lakh names being deleted from Bihar's electoral rolls, which included people who had died, migrated out of state, or were duplicates. For a state already sensitive about voter manipulation, this massive deletion became instant fuel for misinformation.
Here is an investigation conducted by The Quint which revealed shocking irregularities in Bihar’s SIR 2025 draft voter list.
Lakhs of young Biharis work in other states, making them temporarily absent during voter verification. This created genuine confusion, which political actors exploited to spread misinformation.
"Political actors critically contributed to misinformation," noted Deshmukh.
Drawing a distinction between acceptable political rhetoric and dangerous attacks on democracy, the analyst said, "Misinformation as part of their campaign against each other is fine, I don't mind it. I don't have a problem if they lie against each other. I do have a problem if the lies are bringing down institutions and bringing down democracy."
The Nationwide SIR Panic Finds Its Epicentre in West Bengal
A review of SIR-related fact-checks by the Team WebQoof revealed that several of the claims we debunked in 2025 was linked to West Bengal.
Between 7 November and 25 November, there was a burst of identical claims widely shared on X, sweeping through West Bengal.
Each claim followed the same process: an unrelated video was taken and recirculated with false captions claiming that people from Bangladesh were fleeing West Bengal due to SIR.
This amplified the immigration angle which finds its center in West Bengal due to the state's border with Bangladesh.
For instance, an X user called 'SK Chakraborty' shared a clip with a caption saying, "See how they have come out against SIR(Special Intensive Revision of Voters’ List) in West Bengal. Illegal Bangladeshis and Rohingyas must be deported. (sic)"
The misinformation cycles of 2025 revealed how quickly routine administrative processes can be weaponised, especially when distrust precedes verification.
Deshmukh sums it up:
"Running elections for 1.5 billion people is no joke. Keep institutions away from petty politics — that is unpardonable."
If left unchecked, 2025 may be remembered not just for who won the election, but for how misinformation reshaped the public’s relationship with the ballot.
(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9540511818 , or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)
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