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A Brazilian photographer and a woman he photographed in 2017 have ended up mired in an election fraud conspiracy in India, and it appears to all trace back to a stock photo site. As Hindustan Times reports, Rahul Gandhi, an opposition politician in India’s Haryana state, made explosive claims of election fraud this week relating to last year’s elections. Bizarrely, 22 of the alleged fraudulent votes cast last year in Indian elections were cast using an image shot in 2017 of a Brazilian woman, Larissa Nery. The man who took Nery’s portrait in 2017, Matheus Ferrero, has been overwhelmed by the news out of India, and has had to delete his online presence altogether because of all the attention, NDTV reports. Ferrero took the photos of Nery as practice, and with her permission, uploaded them online afterwards, including on various free stock photo sites. Ferrero has since removed the portrait from his Unsplash, which is not at all surprising. Gandhi, showing the portrait of Nery during a live-streamed press conference shown below, asked how it is possible that this woman voted in last year’s Indian elections 22 times. At the time, Nery’s identity was a mystery. There is no record that Nery herself, who is now a professional hairdresser in Brazil, traveled to India to illegally vote in the elections, and the photographer, Ferrero, is equally confused about how they ended up involved in this controversy. “They literally raided all my accounts. It was a lot of weird people talking about lot of things,” the photographer told Aos Fatos. As Gandhi alleges, Nery’s portrait was used as part of voter records in 10 different electoral sections, which he argues shows that it is a “centralized operation” of electron fraud. “Someone inserted this woman in the electoral list on a central level, not at the local level of the section,” Gandhi said while photos of Nery flashed on a screen behind him. Gandhi says that in total, his party, which opposes Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, identified 2.5 million votes that have indications of fraud. “They’re using an old picture of mine. It’s a really old photo. I was so young in it, like 18 or 20 years old. They’re using my photo for… I don’t know, some kind of election or voting thing in India. And they’re making me look Indian to scam people or hit each other with it. Look how crazy this is! What a mess I’m in!” Nery told NDTV. Amit Malviya, head of Modi’s information technology and social networks unit described the accusations as imaginative on X, formerly Twitter. “Now he claims that a Brazilian model voted 22 times in the Indian elections! From ‘vote theft’ to ‘vote carnival,’ Rahul Gandhi turned electoral mathematics into stand-up comedy.” In any event, there is no evidence whatsoever that Brazilian photographer Mattheus Ferrero or his 2017 portrait subject, Larissa Nery, had anything to do with alleged election fraud in India, but they have nonetheless been caught up in a whirlwind of chaos halfway across the globe. That is certainly not what someone expects to happen when they publish portraits on a stock photo site like Unsplash.
