A Facebook post told of an Illinois voter’s touch-screen voting mishap. Election officials responded

A social media user chronicled her mother’s early voting complication on Facebook. 

"My Mom voted early," the user wrote in an Oct. 29 post. "This is what happened to her!"

The poster said that a voting machine in Galesburg, Illinois, at the Knox County Courthouse flipped her mom’s vote. 

"When I cast my vote for President it immediately clicked towards the other candidate," the post read, appearing to retell the story in the mother’s words. "I could not reverse it. I called for help. Their efforts (were) unsuccessful. They brought in our County Clerk, Scott Erickson. Scott got it to finally cancel the vote and the machine let me cast my vote for President." 

The poster encouraged people to check their votes and added that "it was ALL Republican votes being changed to Democratic candidates." 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.  (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

When we looked into the poster’s secondhand account, we found that a local election official had described responding to a similar issue that has since been resolved.

Officials took a touch-screen voting machine out of service after it failed to properly reflect a voter’s choice during early voting in Knox County, Illinois. Voters noticed the machine reflected the incorrect choice and reported it to election officials before their ballots were cast, WGIL-FM, a local radio station reported. Knox County Clerk Scott Erickson told the station the machine will not be used for the rest of the election.

Erickson, who was mentioned in the Facebook post, said that a machine was having calibration problems, which resulted in the wrong choices being selected. 

"It was more than likely a calibration issue with that machine," Erickson said. "We recalibrated it, put it back into service and everything was going smooth. A few days later, that machine started presenting the same type of issues, and at that point in time, it was my determination that we were going to take that machine offline, and out of service for the election." 

The Facebook post said, "(My mom) suggested taking a stylus to vote, but I still don’t know why it would have switched?"

It’s unclear exactly what happened in this voter’s exact situation, but election officials in other parts of the country where people accused machines of vote flipping urged people to use a provided stylus. 

Chris Madison, director of the Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners, said using a stylus pen can help voters avoid an error in which they bump the wrong candidate’s name with a finger. PolitiFact recently found Pants on Fire! a claim that voting machines in Fordyce, Arkansas, had been flipping votes. 

The machine in question in Galesburg has been taken offline, WGIL reported.

Erikson said the votes cast on that machine before it was taken out of service are all safe and have been cast. 

"There’s a memory card that stores those votes, so all of those votes will be included in the final tabulations on election night," he told the radio station. "We are just not using that machine for the duration of the election."

Since 2006, voters in Knox County, Illinois, have been allowed to choose whether they want to vote using a touch-screen machine or by filling out a paper ballot, the county’s website said. Voters who choose to use a machine can review their ballots before they’re cast.

Erickson — who told the radio station he votes using the touch-screen machines on Election Day — assured voters that using the machines is safe: "Electronic voting is most absolutely safe."

We contacted Erickson for comment and received no response before publication.

We found no evidence this issue signaled some sort of partisan fraud.