Old Voting Machine Videos Are Not From the 2026 Midterms, Reuters Finds
Videos shared on social media in October as evidence of vote-flipping in the current midterms are years-old clips of a touchscreen model no state uses anymore, Reuters reported Monday — and one of them was filmed in Virginia Beach in 2014.
Capital-region voters scrolling social media on the eve of Election Day may run into a familiar claim: that touchscreen machines are flipping votes in the 2026 midterms. Reuters' Fact Check team reported Monday that three of the clips being shared for that claim are years old, miscaptioned, and show a machine model that is no longer used anywhere in the United States.
The three clips were posted to X on October 21 and 22. Reuters traced them to uploads in November 2014, August 2019 and November 2018, and the candidate names visible in them belong to those old races, not the current vote. In each instance, Reuters reported, the error pictured was detected and corrected at the time, and it involved a specific model — the AccuVote TSX, made by Premier Election Systems, formerly Diebold — which the Verified Voting registry shows no state has used since 2024.
One clip has a direct capital-region lesson. It was filmed in Virginia Beach during the November 2014 midterm and shows a voter struggling to mark a choice on an AccuVote TSX touchscreen. Christine Lewis, the city's director of elections, told Reuters the error was attributed to the machine's age and to yearly maintenance not being performed, and that since 2015 the city's machines have been on a maintenance contract. All of Virginia Beach's 2026 midterm ballots are paper, she said, tabulated by other equipment. In the Indiana clip, from Tippecanoe County in 2018, elections specialist Mike Smith told Reuters the faultiness affected less than 1.5 percent of the machines in use that cycle, the voter ultimately marked his ballot as intended, and the county replaced the model in 2021.
Reuters' verdict was one word: miscaptioned. None of the three jurisdictions highlighted in the old clips has reported machine mishaps during the current election cycle, the report said. For voters in the District, Maryland and Virginia heading to the polls Tuesday, the practical takeaway is the one election officials give every cycle: check the date and the ballot in any viral voting video before treating it as news about this election.
