An image delineating religion-wise vote share of different political parties in the recently concluded West Bengal assembly elections is being widely shared on social media platforms attributing these statistics to the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The graphic shows that ECI has released this data that shows 91 per cent of Muslims voted for the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and 41.6 per cent Hindus voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the recent West Bengal elections.
Here’s the link to the above post. Check a similar post here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the above claim and found it to be fake.
Before commencement of any election, the Election Commission of India (ECI) or for that matter any State Election Commission, regardless, would release data related to the total number of voters in each constituency.
In this information, the ECI distinguish the electorate based on gender. Data related to the total electorate regarding the recent assembly election in West Bengal can be seen here.
We checked all the publicly available data on the ECI site, but could not find any religion-wise voter trends that have been displayed by the ECI during the West Bengal polls.
On West Bengal’s 2021 election portal, the data that is available is on the number of votes and vote share of each political party, the seats won by political parties, constituency-wise trends and the winner and winning margin in each constituency.
All the other information related to the West Bengal elections 2021 can be seen here.
Publicly available historical electoral information shows that the voter distinctions that the ECI makes public are: Gender breakup (votes cast by voters who are male, female or of a third gender) and Votes cast by service and overseas voters.
These data points can be found here for the Lok Sabha election held in 2019.
In 2009, on reports that a district election office in Jharkhand had asked for the number of voters from a particular community, the ECI in a clarification said, “The Commission hereby wishes to clarify that it does not collect information about religion or caste of voters. The Commission has directed that such information should not be collected by any election authority.”
Thus, it can be concluded that the post delineating religion-wise vote shared by ECI of different political parties in the recent West Bengal assembly elections is fake and should not be believed.
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