Laurel Co. pulls ballot-marking machine after viral video claims Trump vote went to Harris
The Laurel County clerk’s office pulled a ballot-marking machine from public use Thursday, the first day of early voting in Kentucky, after someone posted a video on TikTok claiming their intended presidential vote for Republican Donald Trump instead was credited to Democrat Kamala Harris.
Video of the incident swiftly recirculated thousands of times across social media, where unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud have been promoted by Trump and his supporters for years, especially since his 2020 re-election loss.
Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, a Republican, said in an interview Thursday that his staff couldn’t re-create the issue, but that it pulled the machine aside for examination as soon as it got word of the allegation.
At Brown’s request, an investigator from the state attorney general’s office, a former Kentucky State Police trooper, drove to the county clerk’s office Thursday evening to examine the machine. Brown said in a Facebook post that after several minutes of trying, the investigator re-created the issue once, but couldn’t do it a second time.
The problem, Brown said, occurred when the user touched the area between the two choices.
“I hate that this has occurred here in Laurel County,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post. “We strive to have accurate, secure and safe elections that we are proud to provide to our citizens.”
The machine in question was a digital ballot-marking device, into which voters slide their paper ballots. Voters make their choices on the screen, Brown said, then withdraw their ballots and check to ensure their selections are correct before entering the ballot into a nearby scanner.
In the 16-second video, taken at a Laurel County courthouse annex in London that’s serving as an early voting center, a person’s hand is seen trying several times to touch the box on the screen where Trump’s name appears, with no response. Finally, the box underneath, where Harris’ name appears, lights up instead.
There were no previous complaints about the machine, Brown said, and the voter who posted the video told election workers that her ballot was correct.
“Here’s the thing,” the clerk said. “The official who worked with (the woman who posted the TikTok video) said, ‘Did you vote for Trump?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, it’s on my card.’ Of course, she didn’t say anything until she was done. Which doesn’t help.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Michon Lindstrom, spokeswoman for Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, said: “Our office has received no complaints about ‘vote switching’ or other long-ago debunked rumors.”
Adams wrote later Thursday on X, previously known as Twitter: “There is no ‘vote-switching.’ The voter confirmed that her ballot was correctly printed as marked for the candidate of her choice. Get your voting information from legitimate sources, not TikTok or cat turds.”
Adams’ “cat turds” remark referenced a right-wing X account and conspiracy theorist who goes by the name Catturd. He was one of several large accounts who shared the video Thursday and argued that the incident was intentional.
Laurel County is a Republican stronghold in Kentucky, a conservative state overall. In 2020, Trump defeated Democratic opponent Joe Biden in Laurel County by a ratio of more than 5-to-1, and he won Kentucky by almost 26 percentage points.
This story was originally published October 31, 2024 at 4:44 PM.
