Election day has barely started and already reports of malfunctioning voting machines have lit up social media. Paranoid commenters are certain the machines are compromised. A report that voting machines can be easily hacked isn’t helping, either.
The most frequently reported concern is that machines are preferential to one candidate over the other, and complaints are coming from both sides of the aisle.
ThinkProgress reports that the Republican National Committee is concerned machines are turning votes for Romney into votes for Obama. A search for “voting machine changed my vote” on Twitter brings up a slew of conservatives claiming they were made to vote for Obama.
“What’s your reason for voting Obama-Biden? My voting machine changed my vote,” @masquer08er tweeted.
A viral post on Tumblr has claimed just the opposite, however: Obama votes are being hijacked and switched to Romney votes. The post implicates Romney’s son, Tagg, in the alleged fraud, since he’s supposedly an investor in a voting machine company—a report that has turned out to be completely unfounded.
The above allegations aren’t supported by any hard evidence. But on Reddit, a user did capture video of a voting machine acting bizarrely. The machine appears to have a miscalibrated touch screen, which causes it to select Romney when the voter presses Obama’s name. That video is at the top of Reddit right now.
“From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama,” the OP wrote. “All other buttons worked fine.”
Fortunately, there’s an online tool you can use to report it. Share the incident on the Daily Beast’s form, Having Trouble Voting.
So far, the the form only records one instance of a vote being changed—from Obama to Romney in swing state Ohio. But if a voting machine changed your vote, make it known here.
Photo by grafixtek/Flickr
