Those 'Vote-Flipping' Machine Videos Are From 2014, 2018 and 2019, Reuters Finds — and the Machine Is No Longer Used Anywhere

If a video of a voting machine touchscreen 'flipping' a vote crosses your feed on Election Day, check its age before you share it. Reuters reported Monday that years-old clips depicting uncalibrated touchscreens on a now-unused electronic voting machine are being falsely portrayed on social media as evidence of vote-flipping in the current midterm elections — and traced the three clips in circulation to races in 2014, 2018 and 2019. Reuters' verdict was "miscaptioned."

The clips, posted to X on October 21 and 22, were originally uploaded in November 2014, August 2019 and November 2018, Reuters found, and the candidate names visible in them belong to those old races, not the current vote. One, filmed inside a poll booth in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, shows a voter trying to select Democratic U.S. House candidate Tobi Beck as the mark repeatedly appears beside Republican Jim Baird — a contest for Indiana's 4th Congressional District in 2018, on an AccuVote TSX machine. A second comes from a 2019 Mississippi gubernatorial primary runoff in Lafayette County, and the third from Virginia Beach in connection with the November 2014 midterms.

In each instance, Reuters reported, the pictured error was detected and corrected at the time, and it involved a specific machine model that is no longer used by any U.S. state. Tippecanoe County elections specialist Mike Smith told Reuters the 2018 faultiness affected less than 1.5 percent of the machines in use that cycle; Mississippi's Secretary of State's office said in a 2019 release that 19 votes were cast on the affected Burgess jurisdiction machine before the malfunction was reported and the machine replaced; and Virginia Beach elections director Christine Lewis told Reuters the 2014 clip shows an error attributed to the machine's age and to it "not performing yearly maintenance." None of the three jurisdictions highlighted in the old clips has reported machine mishaps during the current election cycle, Reuters said. For Chicago voters, the practical takeaway is the one election officials repeat every cycle: if a screen ever does something unexpected, stop and summon a judge of election on the spot — and treat a viral clip with no date, place or precinct attached as a claim to verify, not a fact.