Reports of this happening in Tennessee. https://www.wsmv.com/2026/10/21/early-voting-concerns-were-brought-head-tennessee-elections-heres-what-he-said/
I bet lots of these electronic voting machines have been upgraded to automatically fix votes accidentally cast for the wrong candidate.
modified clip from Tim and Eric Awesome Show. Great Job.
So there is the selection machine that prints a ballot paper, and a scanner that actually counts the vote. If the selection machine does such a shit, you should test the scanner, too.
And the odd thing is that all reports mention switching of the vote from DEM to REP, but none in the other direction…
Literally every time there are “errors” with voting, it’s always somehow in the republicans’ favor. Strange that…
everyone balked at the idea that mitch mcconnels last senate election wasnt like that either.
Dems doing the “let’s uphold decorum, as the good guys”, broader libs doing the “thank goodness nothing is seriously wrong, otherwise good guys would be really upset!”
And we plod foot after foot after foot…
It’s possible that the layout of the ballot makes it more likely for the votes to switch in a certain direction. Especially since it sounds like they are using resistive touch screens. If the Republican option was on top and the Democratic option was right beneath it and if people are more likely to hit towards the top of the option, a poorly calibrated touch screen could cause votes to swap (initially selecting the Democrat and then the screen gets confused depending on how the pressure changes as you take your finger off and then selects the Republican above it). These kinds of errors were fairly common when resistive touch screens were the norm.
Then the technician comes out, hits firmly in the middle of the field, sees no problems, and calls it a user error.
In Texas, they used a machine with a kind of joystick to select between the options. And those had a tendency of overshooting the center when you let go of it, so the selector would go back up as you were reaching to hit the next screen button. They put incumbents at the top, so it was more common for people to see it swap from Democrat to Republican than the other way around.
It shouldn’t be acceptable to run elections with machines that have these problems, but there’s no real incentive to fix it.
I get what you’re saying but that doesn’t sound at all like what people are describing.
Like maybe you’d fumble a button once but when you have another go and are determined to get it right?
Sometimes people just do the exact same thing over and over. I’ve seen this a few times. Some app I was working on had a bug where if you touched the icon on the dropdown menu, it wouldn’t work. Anywhere else would work. No one noticed until a support ticket came in where this one person complained about being unable to move past that screen. They were just mashing the icon over and over.
That doesn’t sound analogous at all.
Someone thought an icon was a button.
That’s not the same as someone pressing a democrat button, aparently successfully, and then seeing their vote had flipped to republican.
Especially in a UI which has the sole explicit purpose of enabling a user to accurately select either Republican or Democrat.
My point was that not everybody tries different things. We’d never gotten a complaint before because every other person would try to tap a different part of the button (it was a fairly large button that took up 90% of the width of the screen). I just picked a example that was top of mind, but I’ve seen this in a lot of different contexts involving technology. I’ve had to help people with resistive touchscreen after watching them jab at the same place over and over.
The UI should have the sole purpose of enabling a user to accurately select a candidate, but they aren’t actually made that way. The county in question even provides sticks to help make selections more accurately, so it’s apparently been an issue with their machines for years.
They always manage to put the republican in the position these errors favor
or the fact that we never see the results when it goes into the scanner to be counted, it just says you voted.
Oh I’m sure we’ll institute such a check after this election cycle and we find out that somehow the scanners were malfunctioning as well. But only after it’s too late to change the outcome.