Does this video really show a town mayor ballot-stuffing in Comoros? • FRANCE 24 English
Now for truth or fake our daily factchecking segment and I’m joined Now by Emerald Maxwell so Emerald amid widespread allegations of Fraud and last weekend’s elections in Camaros a video has gone viral of the mayor of the city of foni which appears to show him attempting to commit voter fraud tell us
More yes Monte it looks like a Brazen attempt by a town mayor to stuff ballot papers in The Ballot Box uh there are a couple videos that have gone viral I’m going to show you uh one of them or at least it’s quite long it’s a few minutes
I’m going to show you the first uh few seconds uh we see a man on the right wearing a printed shirt eyeing up The Ballot Box uh quite furtively and then he goes to put something in and he’s immediately stopped by the guy in a stripe shirt and there’s an alocation
Ballot Box falls to the ground um and then people there’s lots of shouting in the background people rushing in um and then there’s a second video that also uh came out and we see the man leaving the building escorted by uh men in uniform um and then this man according to Social
Media is the mayor of f Bon as we see here um and foni is the actually the third largest city in the korus islands mon well so how did you go about factchecking this video to see if it was legit or not well first we wanted to
Check whether this man really was uh as claimed the mar mu mu Ben abdalah so we looked up the uh town Hall um and we found their Facebook page the mar which hopefully has some photos posted of of the mayor and let’s have a
Look at him here so here is the photo of him and here is a screenshot of him and we can see that physically they they look the same they have the same distinctive mole under uh his left eye so uh it is the same person so then we
Flat checked the location and he supposedly uh went to vote here in the town hall of the city so we looked it up on Google Maps and we can see the video and the town the Google Maps photos have physical similarities there is another
Angle of it here we can see the same the color of the walls the windows and the trees and then we also have the interior here uh which is taken from the first video uh we can see that the they have have the same brick walls so that
Is indeed the Town Hall voin Station um and aside from his fishy behavior in the video we Al uh this incident was also witnessed by well there were a lot of witnesses to it including a woman named Aisha suiki who this is a screenshot of
Her from the video uh we spoke to her she was there monitoring the vote on behalf of an opposition candidate and she told us that the mayor was acting strangely that he was given multiple ballot papers by staff and that he was he actually attempted twice to insert
Them into the ballot box but ultimately he was prevented um and on closer inspection of the video we can see here that he appears to after the altercation he picks up The Ballot Box and he appears to have something in his in his hand which he puts in away in
His pocket um so Aisha also told us that the jeams who arrived on scene didn’t arrest him but they they just escorted him out of the building um this tallies with what journalist nurina Abdul who covered the incident uh told us she added that the chairman of this polling
Station is the mayor’s brother and one of the assessors is his half brother and we contacted mayor Ben abdalah who disputes this version of events um he despite well we can see the screenshots from the video where it really does look like he has multiple more than one
Anyway voting paper in his hand but he denies uh attempting to put multiple ballots in the box and claims that the opposition representatives were just trying to prevent him from voting uh by the way the mayor Ben abdalah is a member of the korus president movement
Um he also told us that the presence of several people from his family in the polling station was uh pure chance um so this incident is just one of many uh allegations by the opposition of voter fraud of ballot stuffing in elections that were marred by irregularities and which saw president aalii asumi
Reelected uh prompting unrest in the days since as we can see here in these articles um official turnout was unexpectedly low at 16% and there were large discrepancies between the number of votes reportedly ca for the president and for the regional Governor races which has also raised serious doubts
About its regularity as does this video of course which does appear to be an attempt at voter fraud despite the mayor’s denials Monty great work and really impressive that you guys were able to track down a witness to all of this U Emerald Maxwell that’s Emerald Maxwell with our daily factchecking
Segment truth or fake and that does it for now stay tuned for more world news coming up here on France 24
It looks like a brazen attempt by a town mayor to stuff ballots. In this edition of Truth or Fake, we take a look at two incriminating videos that went viral of last Sunday’s elections in the Comoros, which were marred by allegations of irregularities. The mayor denies the accusations of fraud, which led to his being escorted from the polling station by gendarmes.
Read more about this story in our article: https://f24.my/A4IP.y
🔔 Subscribe to France 24 now: https://f24.my/YTen
🔴 LIVE – Watch FRANCE 24 English 24/7 here: https://f24.my/YTliveEN
🌍 Read the latest International News and Top Stories: https://www.france24.com/en/
Like us on Facebook: https://f24.my/FBen
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://f24.my/Xen
Browse the news in pictures on Instagram: https://f24.my/IGen
Discover our TikTok videos: https://f24.my/TKen
Get the latest top stories on Telegram: https://f24.my/TGen
1 comment
Rigged Elections here. WOW. No integrity. This man will do anything for power. Disgusting. 😒