Those 'Vote-Flipping' Machine Videos Are From 2014, 2018 and 2019 — and the Machine Is Retired, Reuters Finds
Three clips being shared as evidence of vote-flipping in the 2026 midterms are years old, Reuters Fact Check reported Monday — and the touchscreen model in all three has not been used by any state since 2024.
The videos look like Election Eve's worst story: a voter taps one candidate's name and the X lands, again and again, next to the rival's. Reuters Fact Check reported on Monday that the three clips now circulating on X as evidence of vote-flipping in the current midterms are nothing of the season — they were originally uploaded in November 2014, November 2018 and August 2019, and the candidate names visible in them belong to those old races, not this one.
Each clip shows the same machine: the AccuVote TSX, a direct-recording touchscreen made by Premier Election Systems, formerly Diebold, which Reuters identified through the equipment registry kept by Verified Voting, a nonprofit that tracks election technology. In each instance, Reuters reported, the calibration error pictured was detected and corrected at the time. In Tippecanoe County, Indiana — the 2018 clip, filmed as a voter tried to select Democrat Tobi Beck against Republican Jim Baird — elections specialist Mike Smith told Reuters the faultiness affected less than 1.5 percent of the machines in use that cycle, and the voter was ultimately able to mark his ballot as intended. In Lafayette County, Mississippi, in 2019, the secretary of state's office said 19 votes were cast at the Burgess precinct before the malfunction was reported and the machine replaced. In Virginia Beach in 2014, elections director Christine Lewis told Reuters the error was attributed to the machine's age and skipped yearly maintenance.
The decisive fact is the model's obituary. According to the Verified Voting database Reuters cited, no state has used the AccuVote TSX since 2024. Tippecanoe County replaced it with MicroVote systems in 2021. Virginia Beach's 2026 midterm ballots are paper, Lewis said, tabulated by Election Systems & Software equipment. And none of the three jurisdictions in the old clips has reported a machine mishap in the current election cycle.
Reuters' verdict is one word: miscaptioned. For a New York City voter heading to a poll site on Tuesday, the practical takeaway is narrower than the viral claim: the machine in those videos is not the machine — or the paper ballot — waiting for them, and a video's posting date is not its filming date. Election officials' standing advice applies to anything that looks wrong at a real poll site: stop, call over a poll worker, and have it fixed on the record, in the room.
