The video that started it showed a man in Tarrant County, Texas, insisting a voting machine had switched his vote. It spread fast online, and by the time it did, the county had a different story: out of 58,000 ballots cast on the first day of early voting, one was misprinted, and officials put that down to voter error.
Election officials said the problem was human error that had been corrected, and that nothing showed a machine changing votes. Tarrant County is home to Fort Worth and is one of the most populous counties in Texas.
Similar claims surfaced in other states. In Georgia, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said a Dominion machine had changed a voter’s ballot in her district, based on an anonymous viral Facebook post. The Whitfield County Board of Elections, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office and Dominion Voting Systems all said the voter had made a mistake and that it was fixed while the voter was still at the polling place. “There is a reason we tell people to review their ballots. Humans make mistakes,” Gabriel Sterling, the secretary of state’s chief operating officer, wrote on X.
In Tennessee, Democratic Rep. Antonio Parkinson alleged votes for Democrats had flipped to Republicans. The Shelby County Election Commission said it found no irregularities and urged voters to check their ballots carefully before casting them.
What experts say
David Becker, a CBS News election law contributor who founded the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said claims of switched or flipped votes go back to at least 2004 and have come from both Democrats and Republicans. Human error, he said, explained “every single” one he has looked at, yet these isolated incidents often get cited as proof of widespread fraud.
Security experts told CBS News that voting machines can have vulnerabilities, but there is no evidence of machines being hacked or programmed to change ballots. Derek Tisler of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program said frozen screens and jammed scanners are far likelier than malicious interference, and that voters on touch-screens can unknowingly pick the wrong choice. “When I accidentally have a typo in a text that I send, I don’t assume immediately that my phone has been hacked,” he said.
Machines are tested before and after votes are cast, Tisler said. He called a paper record of the vote one of the most important safeguards. States have made paper trails a priority since 2016, and around 98 percent of votes in the 2024 election were expected to leave one. Officials review a sample of those records after the election to confirm machine tallies and can fall back on them if a problem is suspected.
J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor and election security expert, called hand-marked paper ballots the “gold standard protection.” He said about 70 percent of the country votes that way.
The 2020 election produced its own wave of false machine claims. They led to defamation suits, and Fox News settled with Dominion in 2023, agreeing to pay more than $787 million for repeatedly broadcasting false accusations about the company.
