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NEW YORK — The reports erupt on social media every election year: Voters say they tapped a candidate’s name on a touchscreen voting machine, only for the wrong person to light up as their selection.

With some trial and error, and occasionally help from poll workers, the voters are generally able to cast their intended ballots. Nevertheless, some come away from the experience assuming the worst — that the anecdotal issues are proof of a partisan election-rigging scheme.

As early voting in November’s midterm elections gets underway in most states, with soaring turnout in many of them, the claims have returned in force, with voters — especially Democratic ones — in Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas documenting difficulties with the ballot marking devices.

Many voters have described their experiences on social media, with some falsely interpreting the troubles as attempts at election tampering to favor Republicans. The claims come as an AP-NORC poll shows many Democrats have lost trust in election results over the last four years, with many seeing the president interfering with the vote as a major concern.

Election officials say the touchscreen challenges are almost always the result of user error or an easily fixed screen miscalibration, and say the number of complaints this year isn’t higher than it has been in years past, despite the outsized attention on social media. They emphasize that voters can select a candidate as many times as needed, consult a poll worker for help and review selections before submitting their ballot.

Elections in the U.S. are decentralized, with thousands of election jurisdictions controlling the vote, each with different rules set by state and sometimes local governments. That structure makes the nation’s voting process extraordinarily complicated. It also shields it from widespread fraud.

“Almost all of the claims of vote flipping are understandable human error,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who noted disinformation purveyors often seize on well-meaning concerns to sow doubt in the voting process. “Is there one of us who hasn’t had a butt dial or mistyped something on our phones? It is not nefarious.”

Many voters, including Dolly Parton’s sister, report issues

The complaints about touchscreen machines switching votes have gathered tens of thousands of likes, shares and views on social media in recent days, popping up in various high-population areas across the country, including Tennessee’s Williamson and Davidson counties, homes to Franklin and Nashville.

Stella Parton, the sister of the late country singer Dolly Parton, wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday that at her polling place near Nashville she had to “go back three times and correct my vote” because it kept defaulting to Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.

She added: “I’m putting this out here because when we vote, we take it seriously but we try not to hold up the long lines. Do it anyway. Don’t let them rig this election.”

Chad Gray, election administrator in Williamson County, said officials there had found no discrepancies in the voting equipment. If problems or questions do arise, he said, people from each party will examine the devices and make sure they are working properly.

Tennessee Elections Coordinator Mark Goins told WSMV in Nashville that the issues reported in his area were “not a vote-flipping situation.” “It’s more like an unintended touch that they may not even realize,” Goins said.

Another Facebook user explained in a video that when his mother-in-law attempted to vote for Democratic candidates in Kendall County, Texas, the machine kept selecting Republicans. He said she was ultimately able to vote as desired and contended that it could have been user error, but still concluded people were “jacking with our elections.”

Staci Decker, elections administrator in Kendall County, said “100% of the time” the issue can be attributed to a voter tapping the wrong part of the box onscreen or from voters tapping the screen too hard, causing it to become miscalibrated. She said her policy is for staff to recalibrate the screens every few days to ensure the accuracy of the touchscreen.

“This is part of an attempt at every election (especially the bigger ones) to scare voters away,” Decker said in an email. “Every single piece of equipment used in our election is tested before it can be used in an election.”

Reports of voting machine errors common during high-turnout elections

In South Carolina, where an X user said a machine made it hard for her to vote for Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews, state election officials haven’t seen any unusual increase in reports of voters having trouble making selections, said Sydni Bain, a spokesperson with the state’s election commission.

“We commonly receive some of these reports during elections, particularly statewide elections with high turnout,” she said. “We encourage all voters to be careful in making their selections and to review their ballot before it is cast.”

In Bexar County, Texas, where an X user reported having to tap the screen forcefully to get the machine to register her choice of Democrat James Talarico instead of Republican Ken Paxton for Senate, election officials said they couldn’t confirm any equipment issues.

“This could possibly be user error,” said John Moreno, the county’s assistant public information officer. “If a voter has concerns about their ballot, they should bring it to the attention of the on-site judge.”

Kristin Miles, president of the Texas Assn. of County Election Officials and election administrator in Bastrop County, said “vote-switching” claims come up every election cycle.

“Nearly every case comes back to the screen calibration on older touchscreen machines, not a change to anyone’s vote,” she said.

Officials emphasized that machines are tested before each election and that in most jurisdictions, there is a postelection audit that consists of a manual hand count of a sample of paper ballots.

Voting machine company explains what to do if you encounter problems

Voters across the country cast ballots in various ways, including with ballot marking devices that print a paper record or with paper ballots they fill out by hand.

The counties where most of the recent vote-flipping social media reports are concentrated use ExpressVote ballot marking devices from a company called Election Systems & Software. The machines let voters make their selections on a touchscreen. Then, a paper record is typically printed for review before the votes are tabulated.

Katina Granger, senior manager of public relations for the Nebraska-based ES&S, said the company works closely with election officials and provides technical support when needed but has not been made aware of any widespread issue with voting machines this cycle.

She said when a voter is having difficulty, they should ask a poll worker for assistance. If they’ve already printed a ballot that doesn’t reflect their intended selections, “they should notify a poll worker rather than cast it so the jurisdiction can follow its procedures for replacing the ballot.”

Swenson and Goldin write for the Associated Press. AP writers Anna Wilder in Austin, Texas, and video journalist Kristin M. Hall in Nashville contributed to this report.

The Tulare County elections office in the Central Valley was suddenly getting peppered with questions from baffled voters.

On the afternoon of Oct. 13, residents began calling and showing up in person at the registrar of voters’ office in Visalia, worried they would be accused of committing fraud by trying to vote twice.

That’s because, much to the surprise and chagrin of county elections staff, thousands of voters had accidentally been mailed duplicate ballots for the Nov. 3 midterm election.

In the agricultural city of Tulare, a place surrounded by walnut and almond orchards as far as the eye can see, 7,791 voters received extra ballots because of an error by the private printing vendor, said Michelle Baldwin, the county registrar of voters, who noted that safeguards were in place to keep the extra ballots from being counted.

The county’s longtime ballot printer, Porterville-based ProVote Solutions, “has accepted full responsibility for the mistake,” she said.

ProVote Solutions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It is unfortunate that it happened,” Baldwin said. “Of course, we would have preferred this didn’t happen, but it did, and we tried to get right on it and respond within 24 hours.”

It’s the kind of error that, in most election years, probably would be just a minor news story. County elections officials would be trusted with their explanation for the mistake, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

But this midterm has been beset by a growing distrust in the integrity of mail-in ballots following President Trump’s attempt to restrict them before the November election — an effort that was blocked last month by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump, who remains fixated on his 2020 election loss, has repeatedly alleged — without providing evidence — that voting by mail leads to widespread cheating and fraud. He has focused specifically on California, where every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. Seven other states do the same.

On Monday, federal officials charged 28 people with election-related crimes in California, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Among them were several green card holders, some of whom said they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

In this tense political climate, Becker said, even straightforward election mistakes are magnified on social media and become the subject of conspiracy theories, making the job of local elections officials much more difficult.

“Accidents do happen,” Becker said. “Our elections are incredibly decentralized, run by hundreds of thousands of human beings. As a result, we know there is going to be human error, but our elections are not designed to be perfect. That’s impossible. What they are designed to do is be resilient against human error.”

Becker said it is not unheard of for a voter to receive two ballots. Sometimes, a voter will call the local registrar to request a new one because theirs has not arrived by mail — only to have the original eventually show up. And in other states where voters are required to formally request a mail ballot, they may forget they have done so and show up to vote in person.

That’s why, he said, there are well-established checks to protect against double voting. When a voter casts a ballot, they are “marked immediately” in statewide systems that show they’ve done so, he said.

Ballot errors are rare but not unheard of.

On Monday, the Imperial County registrar of voters announced that a “mailing error” caused duplicate ballots to be sent to 160 voters who requested confidential voter status, meaning that, for safety reasons, their identity and contact information are kept off public voting rolls.

“The error occurred as the Registrar of Voters’ Office was updating its procedures to follow changes in California law,” the elections office said in a statement, adding that, on Jan. 1, elected officials and candidates for public office became eligible for confidential voter status, “requiring changes to how their ballots are processed and mailed.”

Tulare County is a mostly rural place that voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections. Portions of the city of Tulare — population 74,000 — are in the redistricted but perennially competitive 22nd Congressional District, where a close race between Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and Democratic challenger Randy Villegas, a political science professor at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, could determine the balance of power in Congress.

Robert Jones, a strategist for the Valadao campaign, told The Times on Tuesday that the campaign had been in close communication with the registrar’s office and was not overly concerned.

“We have a lot of faith in the Tulare County registrar and elections office,” Jones said, “and we would imagine that, with the extra scrutiny, it will be diligent in making sure that only registered voters vote and that they vote only one time.”

Villegas’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mark Martinez, a political science professor at Cal State Bakersfield, said conspiracy theories about the error in Tulare add to what is already a tense political climate in the Central Valley, where a recent surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations has disrupted agricultural communities, sent families scrambling to find detained loved ones, and led to a drop in school attendance.

“People will walk away, stay away or avoid political events especially if you look like me — if you look brown or Latino,” Martinez said.

The duplicate-ballot error in Tulare last week quickly went viral in conservative social media circles, with claims that something nefarious was going on in the middle of a House battleground district. One post on X by right-wing media personality Eric Daugherty said, “Trump is right, this is the MESS mass mail-in voting creates!” and “Stop the cheat!” It was viewed more than 450,000 times on that platform, and screenshots of the post were widely shared on Facebook with additional commentary.

The Republican-leaning city of Tulare has just over 34,500 registered voters, according to the California secretary of state’s office. Not all of them are in Valadao’s district.

About 23% of voters in the city received duplicate ballots.

Countywide, about 3% of the 227,000 registered voters were affected.

Baldwin said that as soon as residents started reporting their duplicate ballots, elections staffers immediately contacted the vendor, which confirmed the evening of Oct. 13 that the batch of nearly 7,800 ballots had been accidentally reprinted and mailed.

The vendor, she said, quickly printed postcards explaining what happened and drove them more than three hours to a postal facility in Sacramento so they would be promptly processed and received by voters by the end of the week.

The mailer, in English and Spanish, instructs those who got two ballots to “securely destroy the duplicate ballot” instead of returning it.

Baldwin said that if anybody submits two ballots, “it will be flagged” by safeguards already in place.

The barcode on each voter’s mail return envelope is connected to his or her voter record, she said. Before a mailed ballot is accepted for counting, elections staff scan the barcode, record that the ballot has been received, compare the envelope signature with the signature on a person’s voter record, and check to see if the person has already voted.

“Your vote stays private,” Tulare County elections staff wrote in a Facebook post explaining safeguards against voting more than once. “After verification, your ballot is separated from the return envelope before counting. The envelope barcode tracks your ballot’s return, not your voting choices.”

In the comments section, one resident was frustrated but circumspect.

“I am livid this happened THIS YEAR OF ALL YEARS!!” the resident wrote. “And also, glad there are protections in place in case any fools try to use both. Good grief!!”

TAMPA, Fla. — José Ramírez’s mental mistake and fielding error cost Cleveland in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series, a day after his bat helped boost the Guardians to an opening win.

He left third base uncovered on Chandler Simpson’s fourth-inning infield chopper, then misplayed Ben Williamson’s grounder for an error that led to three unearned runs as the Tampa Bay Rays evened the best-of-seven series with a 3-1 win Tuesday night.

“It’s a little bit faster here with the surface and I was playing parallel to the base,” Ramírez said through a translator. “The ball bounced right on the edge between the dirt and the turf, and that’s what made it a little more difficult for me. I tried to knock it down.”

“It’s frustrating. I feel bad because I wasn’t able to make that play and after that the runs came in. I feel bad about that,” he added.

A seven-time All-Star who has finished among the top five in MVP voting six times, Ramírez had three hits and scored twice in Cleveland’s 7-3 win in the opener.

Game 2 was 0-0 with Victor Mesa Jr. on first and two out in the fourth when Chandler Simpson beat out a high chopper to shortstop Brayan Rocchio.

Ramírez, shifted toward second base on the left-handed hitter, took a few steps toward Simpson and watched the shortstop throw to first. Seeing third base uncovered, Mesa rounded second and sped to third standing up as Ramírez tried in vain to catch up.

Four pitches later, Williamson hit a two-hopper that struck the edge of where the artificial turf meets the dirt near third. The ball skipped between Ramírez’s legs into left, allowing Mesa to score.

“José kind of got stuck. It looked like he just didn’t move his feet,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “Just kind of looked like he sat back a little bit with his feet set instead of moving his feet. So tough break right there and obviously they capitalized.”

Liam Hicks pulled Parker Messier’s next pitch, a slider, into right-center for a two-run single and a 3-0 lead.

“They’ve done that all year. When they smell blood, they take it and run,” Vogt said. “We had some sloppy plays in the field that we need to clean up.”

Ramírez homered in Games 4 and 5 of the Division Series as Cleveland overcome an 0-2 series deficit, the first Cleveland player to homer in consecutive postseason games since Francisco Lindor in 2018.

The latest episode of the ITV2 programme featured an error that viewers couldn’t ignore

Big Brother viewers have spotted the same error just minutes into the latest episode of the ITV2 programme.

The reality competition returned to screens on Thursday night (October 8), with the housemates still residing in the House of Revelations. The twist is all about exposing secrets in the house, including housemates’ true feelings about each other.

Viewers were ready to tune into the next revealing challenge in tonight’s episode, but they were left distracted by Rochelle’s comment just minutes in. During a conversation with newcomer Twinks, the housewife earnestly asked: “Who was the feminist that ran in the streets, Betty Boop, or something?”

Rochelle went on to add: “She ran on the race course, didn’t she? And got run over.” The other housemates within earshot quickly jumped in to correct her but their replies weren’t especially helpful.

Twinks responded: “Betty Boop’s a cartoon with the big head,” before adding that “Emily Pankhurst” was the feminist who tragically died after being hit by King George V’s horse in 1913.

While Emmeline Pankhurst was the woman who fronted the British suffragette movement, she wasn’t the person who walked onto the race course. That was actually fellow suffragette Emily Davison.

Viewers quickly spotted Twinks’ error and gathered on social media correct her. One X user posted: “for the record, neither Betty Boop nor Emeline Pankhurst ran in front of the horse, it was Emily Davison #bbuk.” A second rightfully questioned: “Wasn’t it Emily Davidson, not Pankhurst who threw herself under the horse? #bbuk.”

Someone else said: “Eye is twitching at Emily Davison being referred to as both Betty Boop and Emmeline Pankhurst. Bless Twinks for incorrectly correcting Rochelle, Pankhurst was closer but they are different people my love #BBUK

While a third eagle-eyed fan chimed in with: “Slight ding for Twinks there. It was Emily Davison who ran in front of the race track horse at the Derby. Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the suffragettes. Know your history if you plan to educate! #BBUK”

But this small mishap is unlikely to sway public opinion on Twinks, who is currently the frontrunner to win the show according to recent odds.

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It comes just hours before the house is set to face its next live eviction following brutal face-to-face nominations earlier this week.

Pauline is up for elimination after receiving five nominations from Lynx, Philip, Rhianna, Rochelle and Catrin. And Rob will join her, having received six nominations from Frankie, Lynx, Omar, Philip, Rhianna and Yasmin.

Viewers are being asked to vote for the housemate they wish to evict. Friday night (October 9) will see the next eviction and the evictee’s first live interview with hosts AJ Odudu and Will Best.

Big Brother continues tomorrow at 9pm on ITV2 and ITVX