Touch-screen voting machines appear to be changing votes in Mississippi
There have been widespread reports of voting machine problems in Mississippi — with residents from more than a half-dozen counties claiming to have had their ballots automatically changed Tuesday while trying to vote in the state’s GOP governor primary runoff.
“It is not letting me vote for who I want to vote for,” said one Mississippian in a Facebook video, which showed one of the voting machines malfunctioning.
Every time the man tried to select his pick for governor — Bill Waller Jr. — the device would automatically choose his opponent, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves.
“How can that happen?” a woman can be heard asking on video.
“I don’t know, it’s in the machine,” a man replies.
A Facebook user named Sally Kate Walker posted the footage of the malfunction on her page Tuesday, with the caption: “Ummmm…. seems legit, Mississippi.”
“As if you needed another reason to VOTE!” she added.
According to the Clarion-Ledger, Waller’s campaign received reports of similar issues with touch-screen voting machines in at least seven counties. The Walker footage was captured at a voting precinct in Oxford.
The machines that were being affected were reportedly TSX models purchased from Election Systems and Software. Those that experienced the “jumping” error, as officials put it, were taken out of service. They were believed to have been mishandled during transport — causing them to lose calibration, officials said.
Waller, a former Supreme Court Chief justice, is currently in a runoff with Reeves for the Republican primary race to see who will face Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood in the general election.
Reeves was in the lead — with 49 percent of the vote to Waller’s 33 percent — when the ballots were originally tallied on Aug. 6.
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