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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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Let me preface this by saying there should only be one takeaway from the news and polls: you still have to vote.
I’ll also note, that I’m not familiar with Tennessee elections, nor do I have any inside knowledge, so I don’t have any information to dispute what Parton said, but depending on the machine, this could be the result of old technology. Georgia had voting machines that were old enough to vote by the time the equipment was retired, so it had technology from about 2000 (think Palm Pilot technology).
I’m not sure what the age ranges are here, but one of the big selling features for the iPhone when it debuted was that it had “multi-touch” input. That meant the device could recognize the input from two inputs simultaneously — without this you would never be able to use a “pinch and zoom” gesture on a touchscreen. Prior to multi-touch, a touchscreen could only detect one input at a time, and it didn’t have any capacitive technology to distinguish between a finger and say, a coat sleeve. So if someone’s finger touched a screen at roughly the same time (or just before) a sleeve or a bracelet slid down someone’s wrist and swung enough to touch the screen, the touchscreen would still only register one input, but it might end up registering the most recent touch. Depending on the spacing and other ballot design choices, that might mean the touchscreen might register an unintended choice.
I’m not saying this is what happened in this case, but I’ve done enough voter support that my colleagues and I were able to suss out this appeared to be what happened several times, particularly with older voters. But the takeaway of all this should be, go vote, and check your ballot before casting it.
For added fun and excitement, old single-point resistive touch displays have a quirk even stranger than only registering the last touch if they were touched in more places than one. In all of them I've messed with over the years ranging from industrial control panel monitors to PDAs to the Nintendo DS, they actually register the touch at the average coordinates of all the places on the screen where the touches are. I.e. pretty much exactly in the geometric center of all of the points. If you still have your old DS lying around you can try this for yourself.
I've used some of those oldschool touchscreens too, in shopping malls where they're used as information displays for an example. It's not infrequent that they somehow get decalibrated and your touch registers a centimeter or two away from where you touched it for some reason. With a single touch, too.
Yes. If a voter complains about a machine I'd want someone to investigate and have that report go to a few different groups, but I'm not going to assume anything nefarious until I have more.
I always make sure to carefully check the review screen and then again the paper ballot after it has printed.
We have people right here on lemmy who run
sudo rm -rfcommands without checking their syntax, and you expect the average voter to check their ballots before submitting them?(kinda /s but also kinda not...)
Ive also experienced touch screens that take the average of where you and something else tapped and chose that point. My DS comes to mind; touching eith two styluses made the DS choose a line dead center of the two touches.
Could also be poor calibration, but im willing to bet its just good ol election fraud