Voters in 5 states receive texts with misleading polling locations

(Image credit: Bloomberg Creative/ Getty Images)

published 1 November 2022

Movement Labs, a company that facilitates political text message campaigns, took responsibility for accidentally sending voters in five states messages with erroneous instructions for voting.

The messages included incorrect directions for the recipient's polling place that appeared tailored to the voters' location. Voters received messages from the group Voting Futures that identified supposed polling locations by name and address, per NBC News.

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Movement Labs founder Yoni Landau assured it was not their intention to confuse voters. "In some of our texts, we sent addresses and images of drop-box locations when we intended only to include in-person early vote locations," he said. "We didn't specify in our text that we were trying to encourage voters to vote early. Some voters familiar with their election day location thought we were telling them to vote on election day at an early vote location."

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Theara Coleman has worked as a staff writer at The Week since September 2022. She frequently writes about technology, education, literature and general news. She was previously a contributing writer and assistant editor at Honeysuckle Magazine, where she covered racial politics and cannabis industry news.