Urban radio is a verbal force- use it. Here’s something to talk about to all local communities. Early voters in several states say their touchscreen ballots registered a different candidate than the one they selected, fueling a wave of complaints as midterm voting continues ahead of the November 3 election.
In Nashville, Jackie Herrud told WSMV she ran into the problem while voting early at the Hermitage Library. “I kept punching for the Democrat, Jerri Green, and it kept punching back to Marsha Blackburn,” she said, describing three attempts before the machine accepted her intended choice.
Stella Parton, the singer and sister of Dolly Parton, raised a similar complaint. She wrote on Facebook that her selection at the same library kept defaulting to Blackburn, the Republican candidate for governor, and that it took her three corrections before the machine registered her actual vote.
Similar accounts have surfaced beyond Tennessee. In Texas, a voter identified only as Paige said on social media that her ballot repeatedly switched her choice from Democrat Jon Rosenthal to Republican Bo French in a Texas Railroad Commission race, a claim that has not been independently verified.
Election officials have pushed back on the scale of the problem. Tennessee’s Secretary of State’s office said it was aware of only one confirmed instance, even as two separate television stations named additional affected voters. In Texas, officials in Tarrant County reported a single machine irregularity out of 58,000 ballots cast on the first day of early voting.
Poll workers in Tennessee have told voters they can review and correct printed receipts before casting their ballot if a selection appears wrong. No official investigation has found evidence that any machine was deliberately programmed to favor one party, and officials describe the incidents reported so far as isolated calibration issues rather than confirmed tampering.
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