Day: 2 November 2024

Claim:

“Some voting machines in Kentucky are NOT ALLOWING voters to select President Trump,” the X post said. “Instead, when they tap ‘Trump,’ Kamala Harris ends up being selected.”

Politifact: False

Politifact say

No, this video doesn’t show Kentucky voting machines blocking votes for Trump

Social media users claimed a video shows “voting machines in Kentucky are not allowing voters to select” Trump for president.

Kentucky election officials said they investigated the situation and found the incident to be isolated. The problem occurred because the voter inadvertently touched the wrong part of the voting machine’s screen.

Officials said the voter who had the problem was able to cast her ballot as she’d wished.

We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

Link to the article: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/nov/01/social-media/no-this-video-doesnt-show-kentucky-voting-machines/

newschecker: Missing Context

newschecker say:

Viral video purportedly showing a US citizen’s vote for Donald Trump being switched to Kamala Harris is being shared in false context. Viral video shows user error, say officials.

Link to the article:
https://newschecker.in/fact-check/us-polls-ballot-machines-not-allowing-voters-to-vote-for-trump-heres-the-truth-behind-viral-video/

We say: True

Justification

Sometimes i’m drawn to these fact checks and I want to stay away but the utter bullshit in them makes me react. I mean how gullible do they think people are? Do Fact checkers really think they have enough sway over the public such that their stupid denials will change the truth of matters?

Evidence

Here is a video of the event from @jackunheard:

Now let’s see what Politifact had to say:

After bashing other sites for showing the video, they then write

But Kentucky election officials emphasized that this incident was isolated and it does not show fraud or widespread election interference.

So they start here with an admission that a problem was identified with a voting machine and it was a one off. Then they seek to minimise the problem.

Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, a Republican, posted on Facebook at 1:43 p.m. on Oct. 31 that he was alerted to an incident that day in which one of the ballot marking machines malfunctioned. He wrote that the machine had been taken out of service and the county contacted the state attorney general’s office.

Next we get this comment from an authority stating that there was a malfunction and that the machine had been taken off line.

Doing what these outlets do best, they then deny the problem and admit it

“We checked it and couldn’t make it recreate the incident reported,” Brown wrote. “We had no complaints prior to or after the complaint. We have left the machine in full view and are awaiting further directions.”

At 5:13 p.m., Brown gave an update on the situation, after the attorney general’s office had visited the vote center to inspect the device.

“In full disclosure, after several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario, it did occur,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post. “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.”

So an admission following a denial that the problem existed, then a minimising statement seeking to reassure the reader this is not important. However the explanation that follows the admission seeks to blame the user..

Brown also shared a video of a county official testing the same voting machine used in the viral video. The official tried tapping the small check box, as the person in the viral video had, but it didn’t work. When the official tapped the center of the candidate’s name field, the box turned green to show it was selected.

“These ballot marking devices are set for a voter to touch inside the whole box with the name of the candidates. In the video posted you can see us going back and forth through the names with no issues,” Brown wrote. “There were no claims of any issues with the device prior, and none since it went back into service.”

This quote follows later in the article and is utter nonsense and what really got me going. It says that the official tried tapping the check box and it didn’t work. The article then goes on to to quote the official mansplaining how the devices are meant to work and to further minimise the issue.

Trouble is, this is garbage. I will admit the user interface is terrible on these screens, but it is done this way to imitate a paper ballot, and on a paper ballot the check box is exactly where a vote would be marked by pencil/pen. This can be seen in an alternative ballots from other voting stations:

Politifact then go on to quote James Young, a former Kentucky election administrator

“If you look closely, the voter is attempting to press the small check box located within the text box. Consistently, the voter gently presses their finger on the thin border, which at times can cause an adjacent text box to highlight instead of their intended choice,” Young wrote. “Had the voter pressed the center of the text box, this would not have occurred.”

This is just straight up brain washing, and to say otherwise is to tell a very obvious lie. It is intuitive and not at all unreasonable for a voter to touch the check box as a way of submitting their vote. This is how a paper ballot would be marked and it is implicitly the same thing they are looking at on a screen. It has been designed this way on purpose, as bad as it is, and had the user interface been designed properly (but maybe not allowed by law) it would have had a nice big obvious button that would have been the thing to touch to vote, e.g.

So let’s now address the machine itself. We can see that there is no selection of the candidate when the check box being touched in the video, and ultimately a touch is later detected but in the wrong place.

The voting machine used in Kentucky appears to be an ExpressVote ES&S possibly model DS300. The specification can be found here: https://verifiedvoting.org/election-system/ess-expressvote/

Curiously the specification website shows a much better user interface not used in the video in question!

Anyway I have worked on systems like these and know that the effect seen in the video can be due to a badly calibrated touch screen digitiser. This is the part that sits in front of the lcd screen and separately detects the finger press. In my experience the calibration of these digitisers is easy to lose, and they need manually calibrating involving touching corners of the screen to show the limits of the display underneath. If this is not done then the digitiser can think the screen starts and ends in a different place.

Here is an example calibration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5kzmUwkLc

So it may be that the touch screen was poorly calibrated and this caused the checkbox of the first candidate to be unusable, but below this the larger area of this screen could have been selectable. This could also explain why the candidate below was highlighted when the one above was clearly selected. The screen and the digitiser were not in alignment.

In terms of the fact check, it is obvious that the user was not in error, both in their expectation of where to touch the screen, and in where they actually touched the screen. It was clearly the voting machine which failed.

What remains then, is the question of the nature of the problem witnessed and the scale of the problem.

Clearly there is a lot of minimisation of the issue, by both Politifact, and the election officials, and presumably also by the technicians and the manufacturer too. If all the machines in this election are the same ones by the same company then a flaw in the digitiser, requiring recalibration of the machine could be widespread. However if there is a process in place to say calibrate regularly this should mitigate a hardware glitch like this (it was stated that this machine was returned to service without further error). It was wrong in my opinion to minimise the situation without explaining it to the reader.

Lastly then, could this “bad hardware” on one machine be seen as a political move intended to favour the candidates lower down the screen and penalise the top-most candidates with the check boxes that cannot be selected. I would have to say that this is possible if someone were so inclined to rig the voting machine, based on what I can see above. It’s a difficult one to prove and could easily be excused as calibration going off “again”.

To address the girth of a potential fraud, I would suggest that a bad actor would have to have this setup of the order of the candidates across the whole country, and for each of the machines to be the same ones. Otherwise a widespread fraud using this technique would be unlikely. Wedded to this is the ability for voters to nullify and redo their vote when the machine goes wrong, so apart from the cases where a voter doesn’t notice the error and doesn’t check their printout. Again, not impossible but what are the chances?

Conclusion

So to address Politifact’s question; Does this video show Kentucky voting machines blocking votes for Trump? The only answer can be Yes, whether intentional or unintentional.

It is evidential that a vote for Trump was not possible and instead without selecting the button for Harris, a vote for that candidate was inadvertently chosen by the voting machine, and it would have gone on to print out a ballot with that selection made incorrectly.

I would suggest that this is a fault of the hardware and/or software on this voting machine, it is a bad user interface and the user is correctly trying to do the right thing but the machine won’t let them.

On the subject of political fraud, I would say this is improbable but not impossible.

To call this report as anything other than truthful is untruthful on the part of the fact checker and the election officials. There is much minimisation of the issue in this Politifact article and while I can understand why they should want to do this, it is not right to do it in this case. All of this model of voting machine likely has the same problem!