There is in fact
a single report out of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, that between 5 and 6 machines had malfunctioned and switched a straight-Republican ticket to a straight-Democrat ticket. The problem is a familiar one, and is just as likely to switch votes from Democrat to Republican as otherwise. The board of elections in Lebanon said it had repaired the machines, which were brought to their attention by voters who saw that their vote had been registered incorrectly by the touchscreen voting machine.
“This happens every election,” said Stanford computer science professor David Dill, who has spoken out against voting processes that rely too heavily on technology, especially in the voting booth. “It’s admitted by the local officials, who say they’ve fixed the problem,” Dill said. “Touchscreen machines have a reported problem of vote-flipping. The usual explanation for this is that the machines are calibrated wrong so when you touch it in one place, it registers in another place.”
Jeremy Epstein of research organization SRI, who successfully lobbied to have
the insecure WinVote system decertified last year, said the problem was familiar to him. “Sounds like screen alignment problems, which happen on the older [direct-recording electronic voting machines] DREs,” Epstein told the Guardian. “In earlier elections, this was blamed for flipping from D to R in some states.It may well be happening, but this is not a partisan problem, but old equipment.”
Dill concurred. “If you were going to defraud somebody on a voting machine, you wouldn’t tell them what you were doing.”
Other voting problems have been reported, but all appear to be the usual crop of errors in badly-designed machines:
glitches that create long lines in historic Democrat stronghold Durham, North Carolina
and
a glitch in a system in coastal Cartaret County, North Carolina that will force polling place workers to recount paper ballots.
US election 2016: Trump and Clinton vote as America heads to the polls – live