What’s all this about “vote flipping” in early voting in Texas? In a viral Facebook post, a woman reported that her touch-screen voting machine had “flipped” her vote, changing it to a vote for her candidate’s opponent. Similar posts followed reporting the same thing in other parts of Texas.
As great as social media can be, separating truth from exaggeration can be tough. Time to bring in the fact-checkers.
Snopes.com has been debunking and verifying online rumors for 20 years. The site did some digging on those flipped votes and gave them a rating of “Mostly False.”
Here’s the part that’s true: “A woman in Tarrant County claimed that her vote switched from Republican to Democrat and she caught and corrected the error; a subsequent investigation determined the machine was working properly, and the woman admitted she may have erroneously selected the wrong candidate.”
Election officials say they are confident that any incorrect votes are due to "voter error", not rigging https://t.co/Z4EpL7F3ni
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) October 27, 2016
The elections administrator in Tarrant County told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that his investigation “indicated that the voter did not follow the directions for straight-party voting.”
Straight-party voting, also known as straight-ticket voting, is when a person votes for the same party’s candidates on an entire ballot.
Mistakes like this happen in every election, the elections administrator for a nearby Texas county told CNN. That’s human error, not voter fraud. As for the reports of other machines flipping votes in Texas? The Texas secretary of state told Snopes “she was not aware of any official reports of widespread or localized vote switching,” despite the rumors on Facebook.
