Does a real video show masked police officers walking around in a polling station and looking at how people are voting? No, that's not true: There is no credible evidence that this incident ever occurred, and there have been no news reports of such an incident. The masked men are marked "Police," not Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), although they resemble ICE agents. An AI detection tool assessed the clip and concluded that "the video is likely AI-generated." The original TikTok version of the video was also labeled "Creator labeled as AI-generated."
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) by the @sarrah_bellus account on X on Sept. 16, 2026. It read:
This is Trump's version of Midterm Election 2026...
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @sarrah_bellus on X.)
The video is embedded below:
This is Trump's version of Midterm Election 2026... pic.twitter.com/A6vbXEKtp1
-- Sarrah Bellus (@sarrah_bellus) September 17, 2026
AI detection
The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool concluded the video was 100% 'likely to be AI-generated':
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Original video
The clip (archived here) appears to have originated on TikTok from the @cabracabaret account and was uploaded on Sept. 14, 2026. The video is tagged "Creator labeled as AI-generated," as shown by the red circle in the bottom-left corner of the screenshot below:
(Image source: post by @cabracabaret on TikTok.)
News searches
Lead Stories searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo News (archived here) and found no matching reports about the claim from credible news outlets using the search terms: "masked," "police," "polling station," and "voting."
