A misleading 30-second TikTok video shows a woman questioning a Washington state election worker who's holding out a bag to collect ballots.
"Why are you not allowing us to put them in the ballot box?" the woman asks as she drives closer to a ballot drop box and films the encounter with her smartphone.
The worker tells the woman she's collecting ballots because voting closes promptly at 8 p.m. on Aug. 2, the day of the primary election in Clark County. The worker then informs the frustrated driver that she can still drop her ballot in the box if she wants to.
The TikTok video made its way to other platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, where users shared it and pushed bogus claims that the clip showed voter fraud. Some users falsely alleged that the worker was illegally closing the ballot box early. Fact-checkers debunked the claims, citing interviews with Clark County officials who confirmed that the election worker's actions weren't out of the norm -- the worker was merely trying to help voters in line turn in their ballots on time.
The viral video is just one example of the type of misleading footage voters could encounter ahead of the US midterm elections in November. Even as social media companies have increasingly clamped down on written posts, they've yet to get a handle on short-form video. The TikTok clip, for instance, included a label directing users to the app's election center, but it didn't mention that the content is misleading.
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