Why does water really bend in an electric field? (Patreon)

Using static electricity to bend a stream of water is a main staple of many kids science books. All you need to do the experiment is a balloon and a tap. However stunningly, and I mean STUNNINGLY the phenomenon is not well understood. So Veritasium put up a video claiming this was all due to ions in the water moving back up into the tap. Well a simple experiment shows thats just not the case. Indeed another sequence of experiments suggest it may not be ions at all! (I'll post that video here shortly). However for the current video I wanted people to be able to replicate the experiment, so I did not use the Van der Graaf generator, as no ones going to have one of those, while almost everyone will have access to things like balloons. Got some really cool slow motion footage too... but there are limits to what I can do with my consumer grade camera. Currently looking at getting something a little more heavy duty, but the prices go crazy!