With less than two weeks to go before the November 3, 2026 U.S. midterm elections, a wave of social media posts claimed that electronic voting machines were turning Democratic votes into Republican ones. A copy-and-paste message shared on Facebook, Threads and X around October 21 said early voters in Texas, Florida, Tennessee and Ohio were struggling to get machines to accept Democratic choices, and that the machines kept reverting to Republican candidates unless the voter pressed several times. The rumor was reinforced by a short video of a touch screen apparently marking the wrong candidate and by a separate TikTok clip from Illinois.

Fact-checkers who examined these claims, along with election officials from both parties, found no evidence that any voting machine is deliberately altering votes. The available evidence points to old footage, misread screen messages, human error and touch screen calibration problems.

What the posts claim

The rumor spread in several forms:

• A generic warning post claiming machines in multiple states were rejecting Democratic votes.
• A Facebook post by Stella Parton, sister of the late Dolly Parton, saying one of her selections in Tennessee kept defaulting to Republican Marsha Blackburn, who is running for governor.
• A video in which a voter tries to select Democrat Tobi Beck, but the screen marks Republican Jim Baird instead, shared with captions describing it as proof of nationwide rigging.
• A TikTok video from a woman in Cook County, Illinois, who said a Dominion machine told her a Republican judicial candidate she picked was not a popular choice.

The “vote flip” video is from 2018

The most widely shared clip appears to be genuine, but it is not from 2026. According to Snopes, it was reportedly recorded during the 2018 midterms at a polling place in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Beck and Baird were opponents in that year's race for Indiana's 4th Congressional District, which Baird won comfortably.

At the time, the Lafayette Journal & Courier reported that the county clerk had received a handful of formal complaints during early voting. Officials from both parties looked into the issue and did not find anything widespread or deliberate. The county's Democratic Party chair said she did not believe malice was involved and attributed the problem to poor calibration of the touch screens. Indiana has since added a paper trail that lets voters check their choices independently. A current Tippecanoe County election specialist described the recirculated video as deceptive and the vote-switching allegations as false.

The Cook County claim does not match the ballot

The Illinois TikTok claim falls apart on a basic fact: there are no Republican judicial candidates on the 2026 Cook County ballot. Officials from both parties rejected the story, as Snopes reported. Cook County Clerk Monica Gordon, a Democrat, explained that voting equipment does not rank candidates by popularity or discourage any choice, but it can warn voters who leave a contest blank or make fewer selections than allowed, known as an undervote. Streamwood's village clerk, a Republican, said his office tried and failed to reproduce the message the woman described.

The clerk's office said it had received no similar complaints, even though more than 54,000 early ballots had already been cast in a jurisdiction of roughly 1.8 million registered voters. The woman later posted a follow-up saying she would remove the original video, admitted she was wrong about the judicial race, and said she had not meant to mislead anyone. The most likely explanation is that she misread a standard undervote notice. The machine maker, formerly Dominion Voting Systems, was bought in 2025 by former Republican election official Scott Leiendecker and renamed Liberty Vote; its spokesperson pointed to the clerk's statement.

What state officials found

In a broader review, Snopes contacted election officials in six states named in the posts. None reported evidence of systematic vote switching. Several said the reports most likely came from human error or touch screen alignment, and noted that voters can review their choices and get help from poll workers before submitting a ballot. The few firsthand accounts that surfaced described temporary problems that were corrected before the vote was cast, not completed ballots with wrong selections.

Why a coordinated vote flip is implausible

U.S. elections are run by states and local governments, which buy and test their own equipment. That makes a nationwide, coordinated rigging scheme extremely difficult to organize, let alone keep secret. Other safeguards include:

• Public testing: each state mentioned in the claims requires testing of voting equipment before elections.
• No internet connection: federal certification requires voting systems to be isolated from outside networks.
• Federal minimum standards: under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, voters must be able to review and correct their selections before casting a ballot, systems must produce an auditable record, and error rates may not exceed one per 10 million ballot positions.
• Paper records: many states print a paper ballot or record that voters can check before submission.

Vote-switching rumors are not new. Similar claims have circulated since at least 2008 and have resurfaced in nearly every election cycle without supporting evidence.

What voters can do

Voters who see a wrong selection on a touch screen should not cast the ballot. They should use the review screen or printed record to check their choices, and ask a poll worker for help or to recalibrate or switch the machine. Concerns should be reported to local election officials, who are responsible for investigating them.

Verdict

The claim is false. The viral video is from Indiana's 2018 election and was attributed to calibration problems at the time. The Cook County story conflicts with the actual ballot and was likely a misread undervote warning. Election officials in several states reported no evidence of machines switching votes in the 2026 midterms.

Sources

• Snopes: Video of voting machine ‘switching’ vote to Republican is misleading and outdated
• Snopes: Illinois voting machines aren't flagging Republican picks as unpopular
• Snopes: Voting machines aren't deliberately switching votes
• Lafayette Journal & Courier, Election Day 2018 report on Tippecanoe County touch screen complaints (as cited by Snopes)
• Cook County Clerk's Office statement on undervote notifications (as cited by Snopes)