Kentucky election officials are pushing back against unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. vote marking device it garnered tens of millions of views on social media.
Officials said the video depicts an easily avoidable “voting error” that did not affect voters’ final vote.
In the viral video, he appears to be trying to touch a voter in Laurel County, Kentucky Donald Trump’s name on a touch screen voting machine that selected the option Kamala Harris. The video cuts out abruptly and does not show the voter’s final vote.
A spokesman for the Kentucky Secretary of State said the video shows “voter error.”
“Our Office has not received any complaints about ‘ballot tampering’ or other long-discredited rumors. We contacted the County Clerk, who confirmed the voter error and that the vote-marking device was working properly,” the spokesperson said.
According to Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, the voter who posted the original video was able to cast his vote as intended.
The video shows a device that creates a paper ballot after a voter selects their options, according to Brown.
An ExpressVote machine is seen at a polling place at the Black Mountain Public Library in Black Mountain, NC on October 21, 2024.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Voters have multiple options to confirm their choice before printing their ballot, and voters can re-print twice if they are not satisfied with their choice.
“When you’re happy with your vote, you can put it in the scanner and it verifies that it’s been counted,” Brown said.
Brown acknowledged that election workers were able to recreate the issue once “after several minutes of trying to recreate the scene.”
“This was accomplished by hitting an area between the frames. After that we tried to do it again for several minutes and couldn’t,” Brown said.
Laurel County Clerk and Election Systems & Software — the company that makes the ExpressVote vote-marking device — has suggested that the video inaccurately portrays how the machine normally works.
The Laurel County Clerk’s Office shared a video of a user clicking candidate options without issue to prove the machine is working properly.
“In the posted video you can see us going back and forth through the names with no problem. It’s the same machine the voter is using in the video,” said Brown.
In a statement, Electoral Systems A & Software spokesman said problems with touch-screen voting machines are “rare”.
Lara Trump, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said on X that election officials could not find any errors when testing the machine.
“The @GOP legal team immediately investigated a voter’s report of a machine malfunction in Kentucky that would have failed to elect President Trump. We called election officials directly. They took the machine apart, ran the proper tests, found no errors, and confirmed the voter. that they can vote properly,” Lara Trump said.
The Laurel County Clerk’s office said the machine was taken out of service immediately after the incident.
“Detectives have contacted the county clerk and recommended that the voting machine be changed,” Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said in a statement. “All Kentucky voters can be confident that our elections are safe and that potential problems will be resolved quickly.”
“Touchscreen Voting Machines Don’t Flip Votes,” Election Systems & Software said in a statement.
“Voting machines are designed to accurately capture voters’ choices, allowing them to see and verify those choices on screen and on paper ballots before tabulating that paper,” the statement said. “There is no scenario where a voter is forced to cast a vote that does not reflect their intentions.”
