Tennessee voters’ touchscreen mix-ups are real; there’s no evidence machines are flipping votes

Fact-check · Elections · Tennessee

Reviewing: a widely shared Reddit post, “Multiple Reports of Voting Machines Flipping Votes to Republican Candidates Automatically,” with a WSMV clip from Williamson County, a Threads post from Memphis, and a claim that the same is happening in other states · Published 2026-10-21 · 17 sources

Verdicts

• TrueWilliamson County early voters report problems with ballot machines selecting Blackburn when they chose Green.One named Williamson County voter told WSMV her Green selection kept jumping to Blackburn, and another said hers went to “another candidate.” WSMV reports dozens of similar accounts in Davidson and Williamson counties. Stella Parton described the same at a Nashville library.
• MisleadingVoting machines are flipping votes to Republican candidates “automatically.”Voters saw the wrong name highlighted on the touch screen and corrected it, sometimes after several tries. No account describes a vote changing after the voter confirmed it, and the counted record is a paper ballot the voter can read. Officials trace this pattern to touches landing on the wrong part of the screen, and Tennessee’s ballot order, which lists Republicans first, can explain why stray touches favor them.
• UnprovenA Memphis voter: “All of my selections converted to the Republican candidates.”The Threads post is anonymous and we could not verify it. County officials traced similar Shelby County complaints in 2024 to voters touching the wrong part of the screen. The poster says she corrected her ballot before submitting it.
• Unproven“This isn’t just happening in Tennessee. There are reports of voters in other states” seeing machines switch Democratic picks to Republicans.We found one social media post naming Texas, Florida and Ohio, but no 2026 news reports or official complaints of the same problem outside Tennessee. The problem reported in Bexar County, Texas, was a ballot-style mix-up, not switched votes.
• FalseImplied: the switching voters described shows the machines are rigged or programmed to favor Republicans.No evidence supports it. The switch happens on screen, where the voter can see and correct it, and Tennessee’s Republican-first ballot order explains its direction without any tampering. This evidence cannot rule out every form of tampering; the defense against a silent change to the printout is voters reading the paper and post-election audits.

The post

The video is a WSMV Nashville segment headlined “Early voters report problems with ballot machines.”^[1] The “reportedly flipping” framing matches a post by The Tennessee Holler, a progressive outlet, which wrote of “reports of Tennessee voting machines flipping Democratic/@Jerri_M_Green votes to Republicans/@MarshaBlackburn votes.”^[5] Green, a Memphis city council member, and Blackburn, a U.S. senator, are the major-party nominees for governor on the Nov. 3 ballot.^[6]

What voters reported

The reports are real. Jackie Herrud told WSMV that at the Longview Recreation Center in Spring Hill, “I kept punching for the Democrat, Jerri Green, and it kept punching back to Marsha Blackburn.” She said poll workers there had heard similar complaints.^[1] Toni Fitzgerald, at another Williamson County site, said: “You try to push the button for the candidate that you’re selecting, and it goes to another candidate.” She said she first thought she had clicked wrong, that the button was hard to push, and that her site had no stylus available.^[1] WSMV later reported that “dozens” of voters in Davidson and Williamson counties described the same mismatch.^[2]

Stella Parton, Dolly Parton’s sister, wrote that at the Hermitage Library in Nashville she “had to go back three times and correct my vote because it kept defaulting to Marsha Blackburn,” and called over a poll worker on the third try.^[3] In Madison County, the Jackson-Madison County NAACP and other groups said at an Oct. 17 press conference that they had received numerous complaints of machines changing selections. The county’s elections administrator, Lori Lott, said she believes it is user error and that the machines are tested with both parties present.^[4]

The official count is lower. The Secretary of State’s office said it had received one complaint of this kind out of about 400,000 ballots cast.^[1] State elections coordinator Mark Goins later said a few more calls came in after WSMV’s first report, including one from someone who had not experienced the problem but was worried by the story.^[2] The gap between “one complaint” and “dozens” in the press is probably explained by where people report: most voters described their experience to reporters or on social media, not to the state. It also means the state’s figure likely undercounts how often voters see it. Fitzgerald, for one, did not tell a poll worker.^[1]

How the machines work

Davidson and Williamson counties use ballot-marking devices. A voter makes choices on a touch screen, and the device prints a paper ballot that the voter feeds into a scanner.^[2][15] Davidson County chose Election Systems & Software’s ExpressVote in 2019, replacing 12-year-old machines with a system that produces a voter-verified paper ballot.^[15] Goins said the marking device stores no votes; the paper ballot is what is scanned and counted. Tennessee counties use different equipment, and he said this process applies to the machines in Davidson and Williamson.^[2] He described three points where a voter can catch an error:

1. Selection screen. The chosen name lights up green. If the wrong name lights up, the voter can reselect or call a poll official.^[2]
2. Review screen. After all choices, a summary shows every selection before printing.^[2]
3. Paper ballot. The printout shows the choices in text. Scanners display a prompt asking voters to review it before inserting it.^[2]

“For you to vote for a candidate that’s not supposed to be voted for, every one of those checks and balances along the way are going to have to fail,” Goins said.^[2] Fitzgerald confirmed that her machine printed a record she could review and that poll workers said voters could make changes after printing.^[1]

What causes it

Every account we found describes the same thing: the wrong name highlighted at step one, which the voter noticed and corrected. None describes a ballot that was cast for the wrong candidate, or a paper ballot that printed a choice the voter had not seen on the screen. The post’s word “automatically” does not match what the voters themselves said. Fitzgerald described a hard-to-press button and repeated presses; Parton and Herrud described several attempts.^[1][3]

Goins’s explanation is an unintended touch: a fingertip or long fingernail landing near the edge of one box and registering on its neighbor, the way a phone keyboard picks the adjacent letter. “It’s not a vote flipping situation,” he said.^[2] He said that when an issue is reported, his office sends a Republican and a Democratic technician to examine the machine, and that in every case since he took office the cause has been an unintended touch. Davidson County handed out coffee stirrers as styluses in 2024 for this reason and is offering them again on request.^[2]

That explanation comes from the official responsible for the machines, and no technician’s report on the 2026 complaints has been published. It is consistent with what county officials found in similar cases. In 2024, Shelby County voters reported Democratic picks switching to Republicans; officials found voters were touching the small box in the upper-left corner of each candidate’s field rather than the name, and PolitiFact concluded the machines did not malfunction.^[7] That account also explains the direction. A finger on the small corner box can catch part of the field above it, and Republican candidates were listed first.^[7] Tennessee law requires general-election ballots to list the majority party’s nominees first, then the minority party’s, and Republicans hold the majority.^[17] A stray touch near the top of a Democrat listed second would land on the Republican above. We did not see the 2026 screens in Davidson or Williamson, so whether their layout matches is unconfirmed. In Virginia in 2014, the cause was miscalibrated AccuVote TSX touch screens, a machine fault on older paperless equipment, and the affected machines were adjusted or pulled from service.^[9] Calibration drift and bad touches produce the same symptom. Neither changes a vote without the voter seeing it on the screen.

The Memphis post

The Threads post describes every selection on the ballot converting to Republicans. With Republicans listed first in each race, a consistent touch habit could reproduce the same miss race after race. We could not identify the poster or confirm the account, and she does not say which machine or polling place. The poster says she corrected it before submitting.

Shelby County, which includes Memphis, has a recent record on both kinds of problem. In October 2024, its election commissioner received reports from about 10 to 12 precincts “of some irregularities with the voting machines.” Three voters complained directly at polling sites, each cast the ballot they intended, and officials traced the problem to finger placement on new, highly sensitive screens.^[7] In August 2026, a single early-voting machine in Bartlett was missing four judicial races for 307 voters, an error officials blamed on staff and caught because a voter told a campaign.^[16] The second case shows what a real machine-setup error looks like: it affects every voter on one machine the same way, regardless of party. Pre-election testing missed it, and a voter caught it. Without more detail, the Memphis claim is Unproven.

Other states

The caption says voters in other states are seeing the same thing. The Tennessean found an X post claiming “Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio are reporting difficulties getting the machines to accept democratic votes.”^[3] We searched news coverage on Oct. 21 and found no 2026 reports of vote-switching complaints in those states. The problems that did surface elsewhere were of a different kind. In Bexar County, Texas, state data transposed ballot styles where school district lines split a street, so some voters saw the wrong school measures; the county fixed it the first day.^[13] That is a real ballot error, and it ran against no party. The other-states claim is Unproven, and it would take a named county and an official complaint to change that.

The same complaint, every election

Compared against: electronic voting machine “vote flipping” complaints in U.S. general elections that drew official responses, from the 2014 midterms through 2026, drawn from fact-checks and state notices. This is a sample of prominent cases, not a census.

Only three rows report a direction, too few to establish a pattern. They do show the complaint is not one party’s property: Virginia Republicans saw flips toward a Democrat in 2014. Such claims have circulated since at least 2004 from both parties, and election lawyer David Becker told CBS that human error has been the cause of “every single” one he has encountered.^[8] Virginia 2014 shows machines can be at fault, but those were paperless touch screens, and the fault was a visible calibration problem, not rigging.^[9]

What the post implies

“Flipping votes to Republican candidates automatically” implies a machine that favors one party: rigged or programmed. No evidence in any report, official statement or prior case supports that. The pattern described cuts against it. A machine built to steal votes would not display the stolen vote in green on the screen, list it on a review page and print it in plain text for the voter to catch, three times over. Tennessee’s Republican-first ballot order accounts for the direction without any tampering.^[7][17] We rate False the implication that the switching voters described shows machines rigged or programmed for Republicans. The finding has limits. This evidence cannot rule out every form of tampering, and the defense against a silent change to the printout is voters reading their paper ballots and post-election audits.^[11]

A second implication, that checking your ballot protects you, is correct, and it is the most useful thing in the post. It is also more important than many voters realize, as the next section explains.

The strongest case for each side

For taking the reports seriously

Ballot-marking devices are only as safe as voters’ willingness to read their printouts, and most voters do not. In a 2020 University of Michigan study, researchers modified real machines to print an error on every ballot in a mock polling place in Ann Arbor. Without prompting, only 40 percent of participants in those groups reviewed their printed ballots at all, and only 6.6 percent told a poll worker something was wrong.^[11] A separate line of research argues that pre-election testing cannot reliably catch every machine fault,^[14] and in August, Shelby County’s testing missed a machine that left four races off 307 ballots.^[16] Every account in this fact-check comes from a voter who noticed; a voter who did not notice could not report it. The state’s figure of one complaint also understates what voters are experiencing, and no technician’s finding on the 2026 complaints has been released. Calibration faults are real, as Virginia showed. Asking Tennessee to publish what its technicians found is reasonable.

For the official explanation

Every voter in these reports caught the problem, which is the safeguard working. In a 2022 follow-up study by Philip Kortum, Michael Byrne and colleagues, voters required to compare their printed ballots against their selections did so with 99.8 percent overall accuracy across 1,440 contests.^[12] The count comes from paper that can be audited. The same complaint has been investigated for 20 years in both partisan directions without a finding of vote manipulation.^[7][8][9] Machines are tested before each election with both parties’ checks in place, and candidates are invited to watch.^[2]

What it means for voters

This section is analysis.

• Check all three screens. The evidence supports the post’s advice. Touch the candidate’s name in the center of the box, confirm the green highlight, read the review screen, and read the paper before you scan it. Ask for a stylus or coffee stirrer if your fingers or nails make precise touches hard.^[2]
• Report it to the state, not only online. A complaint to a poll official and the county election office triggers the bipartisan technician check. A post on social media does not, and the state’s count of one complaint shows how few voters have used that route.^[1][2]
• Take the time. Parton wrote that voters try not to hold up long lines, then: “Do it anyway.”^[3] Correcting a ballot is allowed. A belief that machines are fixed can keep people home, and the evidence says the vote counts as printed.
• The research gap is real. The Michigan study’s finding, that most voters do not read their printouts, matters more than any one viral clip. In that study, verbally prompting voters to review the printout raised detection, and giving them a written slate of their choices raised it most, to 74 percent of those who followed it.^[11]

What to watch

• Whether the state or the counties publish the technicians’ findings on the machines named in complaints.^[2]
• Any complaint that a printed paper ballot showed a choice the voter never saw on screen. That would be a different and more serious problem.
• Post-election audits and spoiled-ballot counts in Williamson, Davidson, Madison and Shelby counties after Nov. 3.
• Named, official complaints from counties outside Tennessee, which would change the other-states rating.

Parties affected