Why You Should Always Double-Check Your Ballot: Kentucky Voting Machine Showed Trump Vote As Vote For Harris
“I tried to pick Trump 10 times, it would not work.”
That’s part of the caption for a now-viral video on X showing a voter trying to cast a vote for former President Donald Trump. After several attempts, the video shows, the electronic voting machine captured a vote — but it was for Vice President Kamala Harris. Although officials have looked into the issue, such glitches are a reminder to voters to always double (if not triple) check ballots when casting votes.
The user, whose screen name is “it’s me,” said in the post that the incident took place in Kentucky. She claimed she “went to the head of the election board and will send this video to KY attorney general.”
Kentucky Attorney General Michael Adams said in a post on X responding to a report on the incident that “there is no ‘vote-switching’. The voter confirmed that her ballot was correctly printed as marked for the candidate of her choice. Get your voting information from legitimate sources, not TikTok or cat turds.”
Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown later confirmed in a post on Facebook that when the state’s Attorney General’s office came to “check the device,” the incident eventually occurred again.
“The Attorney General’s office has been to the vote center to check the device that has been shown across social media today. In full disclosure, after several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario, it did occur,” Brown said on Facebook. “This was accomplished by hitting some area in between the boxes. After that we tried for several minutes to do it again and could not.”
Brown also posted a video of what he said was “the same machine used by the voter” in which viewers “can see us going back and forth through the names with no issues.” He said there were no other reports of issues with the machine.
Brown explained the machine in the Facebook post, saying that voters insert “a blank ballot into” the ballot marking device before choosing candidates. The machine then shows voters who they chose for each race and notifies them before proceeding if a selection was not made, he said.
“When you come to the end of the ballot it shows you how you voted in every race and issue,” Brown said. “It confirms with each voter that they are satisfied with their selections twice before printing the ballot. Once you receive your ballot back from the ballot marking device you can review your choices again before placing it into the scanner.”
He also noted that if voters “made a mistake,” they could “spoil that ballot and receive another one.”
Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump encouraged voters to report any issues to ProtectTheVote.com.
“The legal team @GOP immediately investigated a voter’s report of a machine malfunction that wouldn’t select President Trump in Kentucky,” Lara Trump said in a post on X. “We called election officials directly. They separated the machine, conducted proper testing, didn’t find any errors, and confirmed that voters could cast their ballots properly.”
It’s not the first time electronic voting machines have caused issues for voters. Just last year a coding error on voting machines in Northampton County, Pennsylvania appeared to flip the votes on a ballot question regarding two state judges. The county’s director of administration later reassured that voters’ “actual” selections were recorded in the “machines’ backend system,” a local NBC affiliate reported.
However, as The Federalist noted earlier this year, “[w]hile Northampton County acknowledged the situation, they completely neglected to address complaints that election officials at certain precincts had instructed voters to vote the opposite of their intention so that the readable text would flip to reflect their desired candidate — a suggestion that could have affected the results of the election.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
