This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
When Dolly Parton’s sister, Stella, reported last week that a voting machine in Nashville had incorrectly recorded her vote selection three times, her allegation quickly spread on social media.
“Don’t let them rig this election,” Parton wrote.
Tennessee officials looked into the issue and concluded that the problem was most likely that Parton kept hitting the wrong part of the screen. They found no evidence the voting machines, on which voters select their choices using a touchscreen, were deliberately switching votes.
Similar complaints have surfaced for years, with both Democratic and Republican voters claiming that machines made it harder for them to select their preferred candidates — including in Mississippi in 2019, Georgia in 2024 and Illinois in 2024. Some involved older touchscreen machines that had fallen out of calibration, causing them to register a different selection than the voter intended. Others, as here, were attributed to voter error. None of those investigations found any evidence of deliberate vote switching.
Voting technology has undergone a gradual evolution from the early mechanical lever machines to modern day touchscreen tablets with printers that produce scannable ballots. Today’s voting machines are far more reliable than those of the past, but they aren’t infallible. Like any technology, they can malfunction, particularly as equipment ages and experiences wear and tear from repeated use.
“There’s no such thing as a perfectly reliable computer,” said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for secure, reliable and verifiable elections. “You can’t really pretend that there is — and you shouldn’t.”
That doesn’t mean voting equipment is inherently insecure, Smith said. Rather, election security depends on the procedures and safeguards surrounding the machines, including paper ballots that can be used to verify results independently of the technology. Most election jurisdictions have those safeguards in place, she said.
‘Voting machines do not change votes’
Voting equipment is expensive to purchase and replace, in part because it must undergo extensive testing and certification before it can be used. With limited budgets and few manufacturers to choose from, election officials often rely on the same equipment for more than a decade, even as technology advances.
The market is dominated by three main players that control about 85% of the market — Election Systems & Software, Liberty Vote, and Hart InterCivic.
The three companies produce different types of touchscreen voting machines, scanners, printers, and software.
The companies have also faced scrutiny over where the components in their machines come from. The Trump administration has raised concerns about parts made in China and other countries, suggesting foreign adversaries could use hidden backdoors in the machines to to change votes, potentially causing the kind of vote switching that Parton and others have reported.
Sara Cutter, executive director of the American Council for Election Technology, a national trade association representing businesses that manufacture voting equipment, said the companies create safeguards to ensure no one tampers with the machines.
For example, companies work with certified transportation companies, track serial numbers of machine components, test components, and refuse to include parts from North Korea, Iran, or Russia. Avoiding Chinese-made components is far more difficult. Manufacturers say some essential electronic parts cannot be sourced domestically, making it virtually impossible to build voting machines without relying on China.
Even so, experts say, the safeguards put in place by both manufacturers and election officials are designed to ensure that voting systems are secure. Election officials strictly control access to the machines and conduct their own tests before elections.
“Voting machines do not change votes,” said Katina Granger, senior public relations manager for ES&S. “Voting machines are tested thoroughly by jurisdictions before every election to ensure they are accurate and perform as expected.”
To guard against problems, the vast majority of Americans cast their votes using either hand-marked paper ballots or machines, known as ballot-marking devices, that record electronically cast votes on paper ballots.
Nearly 70% of registered voters live in jurisdictions that primarily use hand-marked paper ballots, which are typically counted by electronic scanners, according to Verified Voting. Less than 2% of registered voters live in jurisdictions that still use voting machines without a paper trail, according to Verified Voting, and most of them are in Louisiana.
Louisiana has spent nearly a decade trying to replace its aging, paperless voting machines, but disputes involving voting equipment vendors, canceled contracts and political pressure have repeatedly delayed the purchase. The state is still using machines that are roughly 35 years old, even though lawmakers approved a transition to a system with voter-verifiable paper records in 2021.
That paper trail is one of the most important ways voters and election officials can ensure that the ballots are properly counted.
“What makes elections really resilient is having paper ballots in the first place, because they’re not going to break down” like a voting machine might, said Smith.
Voting machine flaws and safeguards
All 50 states now conduct some form of post-election audit to check the accuracy of vote counts and election procedures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The majority — 36 — carry out conventional hand counts of a sample of paper ballots. Seven others require a more substantial review.
“I would never say that a voting system by itself is secure,” said Smith. “It takes the context in which you use it and the responsible use of that voting system to generate the secure election that you want.”
Smith said the various safeguards help ensure that election officials can address any questions about the reliability of the votes.
“No matter what goes wrong, can you still find out the correct outcome?” she said. “That’s kind of the central question.”
Older touchscreen voting machines sometimes need to be recalibrated, said Tammy Patrick, chief program officer at the Election Center, a national nonprofit association for election administrators.
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“Calibration can sometimes go awry, even after it’s tested,” Patrick said at a Votebeat event Tuesday. Even something as simple as a voter’s long fingernails can affect how a sensitive touchscreen registers selections on older machines, she said. “It can happen. I think it’s a sign that we need to properly fund our elections so that everyone can replace their voting equipment with modern technology.”
That’s why election officials conduct checks before, during and after elections, said Ryan Macias, an election security specialist who previously helped oversee voting machine certification at the Election Assistance Commission.
“Every technology has flaws, but it’s not just technology; it’s processes,” he said.
The checks in Tennessee offer a prime example of how voters and election officials deal with concerns, he said, even as concerns were magnified because of who the messenger was.
“If you are concerned that your ballot, your paper record, after you have verified it and ensured that it is correct and accurate, is then being tabulated incorrectly, then show up to the post-election audit,” he said.
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Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at [email protected].
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.
