From a Nashville library to Texas, early voters, including Dolly Parton’s sister, say voting machines kept swapping their Democratic picks for Republicans, and the claims are spreading across social media.
Stella Parton, the younger sister of the late country legend and a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, described her experience in a Facebook post Wednesday that has drawn thousands of reactions.
“In Tennessee last week at the Hermitage Library where I voted, I had to go back three times and correct my vote because it kept defaulting to Marsha Blackburn. I would never vote for her for anything. I’m putting this out here because when we vote, we take it seriously but we try not to hold up the long lines. Do it anyway. Don’t let them rig this election,” she wrote.
In a later comment, Parton fumed at the idea that Elon Musk and Russian bots could tilt the race.
“This is so sad and heartbreaking but to think this is what it’s come to makes me angry for every good and innocent person in this country. To think people like Elon Musk and Russian bots may be [upending] another election makes my skin crawl. May they all die and worms eat them,” she railed.
Commenters on her post described similar trouble at polling sites in Brentwood and Hermitage. One said a poll worker mentioned the machines were running slowly.
Blackburn, a Republican U.S. senator, faces Democrat Jerri Green, a Memphis City Council member and Shelby County’s chief public defender, in the race to replace term-limited Gov. Bill Lee.
Dozens of voters in Davidson and Williamson counties have said machines registered a different candidate than the one they chose, Nashville station WSMV reported this week. Williamson County voter Jackie Herrud told the station she repeatedly tried to pick Green, but the machine kept landing on Blackburn. Poll workers had heard similar complaints, she said.
In Texas, an X user posting as @climatepaige wrote Monday that her machine flipped her pick in the race for Texas Railroad Commissioner, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry.
“My electronic ballot machine flipped my vote to a Republican candidate three times. I clicked on Jon Rosenthal, but then the machine switched it to Bo French. I had to click Jon’s name three times to successfully check out with a blue ballot. Reported it, but WTF!” she wrote in a post viewed more than 154,000 times.
In replies, she said she voted in Austin, ultimately submitted her choices successfully, and flagged the problem to a volunteer near the ballot box.
Rosenthal is a Democratic state representative from the Houston area. French is a former Tarrant County GOP chair who drew widespread condemnation last month for a racist post targeting University of Texas students, which he has stood by.
The progressive Facebook page Alt National Park Service said it has heard from people reporting machine problems in South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee, but noted it had not independently verified the accounts. Meanwhile, a Reddit post claimed Republicans had started "cheating," citing more than 100 similar reports.
Commenters under the Alt National Park Service post shared stories of glitches, including a Richland County, South Carolina, voter who said a spouse’s straight-Democratic selections were missing from the ballot summary until the spouse started over. A Tennessee commenter said the person explaining the machine advised using a knuckle, because finger taps were registering for the candidate listed above the intended choice. Many commenters, however, said they voted without any trouble.
The Tennessee Secretary of State’s office told WSMV it had received one complaint of this kind among roughly 400,000 ballots cast. State election coordinator Mark Goins told the station that in his experience, the machines have never changed a selection on their own. When a problem is reported, he said, the state dispatches one Republican and one Democratic technician to examine the equipment.
Davidson County’s elections administrator confirmed to WSMV that coffee stirrers will be available at every early voting site, giving voters a tool to tap the screen with instead of a finger and avoid accidental touches.
The claims are spreading amid mounting fears among Democrats and voting rights advocates that Trump will try to meddle in the midterms.
Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked the federal government’s top election security agency to secretly obtain a voting machine and hack it, then hand the findings to the White House, ProPublica reported this week. Career staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency pushed back, and the appointees eventually dropped the request, according to the report. ProPublica found no evidence the operation was carried out.
At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last month, Trump led the crowd in a pledge to vote in which he declared he would “cheat like hell like they do,” a jab at Democrats he has repeatedly accused, without evidence, of election fraud.
The Justice Department plans to send roughly 1,000 election monitors to polling places in November, which Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called the department’s biggest observer effort ever. Administration officials have said Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no plans to target polling places but have declined to fully rule out deploying federal agents there.
Top congressional Democrats have sued to block ICE and other federal law enforcement from polling sites, and federal law already bars sending troops or armed men to the polls.
