Those Vote-Flipping Voting Machine Videos Are From 2014, 2018 and 2019, Reuters Finds - and the Machine in Them Is Retired
Three clips shared on X in October as evidence of touchscreen vote-flipping in the 2026 midterms trace to old races in Virginia Beach, Indiana and Mississippi, on an AccuVote TSX that no state has used since 2024.
On the eve of the midterms, some of the most-shared election videos in the country are not from this election at all. Years-old clips depicting uncalibrated touchscreens on a now-unused voting machine are being falsely portrayed on social media as evidence of vote-flipping in the 2026 midterms, Reuters reported in a fact check published Monday and read in full by this desk. Three clips posted to X on Oct. 21 and 22 were originally uploaded in November 2014, November 2018 and August 2019, and the candidate names visible in them belong to those old races, not the current vote; in each instance the 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.
The documented incidents are specific. The Indiana clip, filmed inside a poll booth in Tippecanoe County, shows a voter trying to select Democratic House candidate Tobi Beck in 2018 as the X repeatedly appeared next to Republican Jim Baird; that voter ultimately marked his ballot as intended, and the county's elections specialist told Reuters the faultiness affected less than 1.5 percent of the machines in use in the 2018 cycle. The Mississippi clip comes from the 2019 gubernatorial Republican primary runoff in Lafayette County, where the Secretary of State's office said 19 votes were cast on the machine at the Burgess precinct before a malfunction was reported and a technician replaced it. The third clip is from Virginia Beach in the November 2014 midterm, an error the city's elections director attributed to the machine's age and missed yearly maintenance.
The machine in all three is the AccuVote TSX, made by Premier Election Systems, formerly Diebold, identified by Reuters from Verified Voting's public registry of current voting equipment. According to that database, no state has used the AccuVote TSX since 2024; Virginia Beach, for example, now votes on paper ballots tabulated by ES&S equipment. And none of the three jurisdictions in the clips has reported machine mishaps during the current election cycle. Reuters' verdict is one word: miscaptioned. For Palm Beach County voters heading to assigned precincts on Tuesday, the takeaway is the desk's standing one - if a screen ever behaves oddly, stop and call a poll worker before casting; but a viral clip is not evidence about this election, and these three are not from it.
