You’ve probably seen the videos. A grainy phone recording shows a voter tapping a name on a touchscreen, only for the "X" to jump to the other candidate. It looks like a smoking gun. Honestly, during the 2024 election cycle, these clips were everywhere, feeding a massive narrative about voting machines tampered with 2024. But if you dig into the actual audits and the court cases that followed, the reality is a lot messier—and, in a weird way, more boring—than the internet headlines suggested.
Basically, there's a huge gap between "security vulnerabilities" and "actual tampering."
The Tarrant County "Switching" Drama
Let's talk about Texas. Early in the 2024 voting period, a story blew up in Tarrant County. A voter claimed the machine flipped their selection. People lost it. But when election officials actually investigated, they found it was a classic case of human error combined with a specific hardware quirk. The voter was using their finger in a way that the screen registered a "drag" rather than a tap.
Out of more than 58,000 ballots cast on that first day of early voting, it was an isolated incident. The machine didn't have a mind of its own; it just had a calibration issue that was fixed on the spot. This kind of thing happens every cycle. It’s kinda like when your phone screen gets a bit wonky and opens the wrong app. Does it mean your phone is hacked by a foreign government? Probably not.
What the Wisconsin Audit Actually Found
If you want the real data, you have to look at the post-election audits. Wisconsin is the gold standard here because they take this stuff seriously. In March 2025, the Wisconsin Elections Commission released a massive report. They hand-counted 327,230 ballots across 336 municipalities.
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The results? Zero. Not a single voting machine error was found. No hacked software, no secret algorithms, and definitely no evidence of voting machines tampered with 2024. The only mistakes they found were five human errors—things like a poll worker miscounting a stack by one—which resulted in an error rate so small you’d need a microscope to see it ($0.0000009%$).
Ann Jacobs, the chair of the commission, basically told the public: "The other guy just got more votes." It’s a tough pill for some to swallow, but the paper trail doesn't lie.
The Real Threat: Insider Access
Now, just because the machines weren't "hacked" from the outside doesn't mean everything was perfect. If you want to talk about actual tampering, you have to look at "insider threats." This is where things get sketchy.
CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) and the FBI have been tracking cases where local officials—the people actually trusted to run the show—tried to bypass security. We saw this with the criminal conviction of Tina Peters in Colorado. While her case stemmed from 2021, the fallout reached its peak in 2024. She was sentenced to nine years for allowing unauthorized people to access the voting system's "brain."
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Why Insider Threats Matter
- Access Badges: Officials giving badges to non-employees.
- Camera Shutdowns: Intentionally turning off security feeds during "maintenance."
- Data Extraction: Copying proprietary software onto personal thumb drives.
These aren't "hacks" in the Hollywood sense. It’s people with keys to the building doing things they shouldn't. In 2024, several states had to decommission equipment because an "insider" had compromised the chain of custody. When the seal is broken, the machine is toast.
The "Starlink" and "Barcode" Myths
Social media had a field day with Elon Musk's Starlink. The rumor was that Starlink satellites were "uploading votes" in swing states to flip the count.
Honestly, it’s total garbage.
Voting machines are not connected to the internet while they are tabulating votes. They are "air-gapped." You can’t upload something to a machine that isn't plugged into a network. Even the experts who are most critical of machine security, like Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan, admit that while vulnerabilities exist in the code, there was no evidence of a coordinated network-based attack in 2024.
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Halderman has shown in court that barcodes on ballots could theoretically be manipulated, but the 2024 cycle saw a massive shift back to paper. Roughly 98% of voters in 2024 had a paper record of their vote. That paper is the "source of truth." If a machine tried to lie, the hand-count would catch it immediately.
Was There Any Actual Tampering?
If we’re being precise, "tampering" implies a successful effort to change the outcome.
As of early 2026, there has not been a single verified instance where voting machines tampered with 2024 resulted in a changed election result. We saw glitches. We saw human errors. We saw a few rogue officials try to "test" the systems illegally. But the safeguards—the tamper-evident seals, the dual-party custody, and the physical paper ballots—held up.
A report from Free Speech For People in August 2025 did argue that many swing states need better audits. They weren't saying the results were wrong, but rather that the current audit process is sometimes too opaque. It’s a fair critique. We should always want more transparency. But "not transparent enough" is a far cry from "the machines were rigged."
Actionable Steps for the Next Election
If you’re still worried about the integrity of the machines, the best thing you can do isn't posting on X or Facebook. It’s getting involved in the process.
- Verify your ballot: If you use a BMD (Ballot Marking Device), read the printed paper before you feed it into the scanner. If it’s wrong, ask for a new one. That’s your right.
- Become a poll worker: Most of the "scary" things people imagine happen because they don't see the boring, strict rules poll workers have to follow.
- Watch the L&A testing: Before every election, counties perform "Logic and Accuracy" testing. It’s open to the public. You can literally watch them run test ballots through the machines to prove they count correctly.
- Follow the paper: Support legislation that requires hand-marked paper ballots and robust risk-limiting audits. Paper can't be "hacked" by a line of code.
The 2024 election proved that our tech has flaws, but our systems for catching those flaws are actually pretty robust. We don't need to fear the machines; we just need to keep a very close eye on the people who operate them.