With a week left till the midterm elections, Democrats are on edge.

Every day brings some new reason for concern. The Department of Justice files last-minute challenges to election procedures in several states. National Guard members are photographed in front of a ballot drop box in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump casts doubt on the results of a Brazilian election that his ally lost, using his old election denial playbook.

It’s no wonder, then, that an AP-NORC poll earlier this month found a 20-point drop in the percentage of Democrats who were confident that votes would be counted accurately since 2022.

In this environment, then, a social media post in which a Democrat alleges that a touchscreen voting machine flipped her vote to a Republican candidate is likely to catch fire online. This time, it came from Stella Parton, sister of the late musical legend Dolly, who said she had to tap three times to correct her vote for senator in Tennessee. “Don’t let them rig this election,” she wrote.

We’ve been here before. Pretty much every election cycle, someone has a bad experience with a touchscreen voting machine and it goes viral — especially if it’s a voter from the party that is out of power.

I get it. There’s something about touchscreens that’s inherently stressful as it is. My text messages are always just a few letters off, I accidentally got Diet Coke at the newfangled soda machine, and my car stereo keeps playing the wrong song when I’m on the highway. Those are bad enough. But to think I might fat-finger my way into voting for the wrong candidate is far worse.

It’s a leap, though, to go from that to the idea that this is proof of rigging the election. In fact, it would be one of the dumber ways to try that.

Just think about it. Why would a machine that has been hacked to change the outcome of an election show you that it’s doing it? Wouldn’t it make sense for the machine to pretend it’s counting your vote and then record something else? I know I’m supposed to fact-check this sort of thing with more high-minded logic, but this particular conspiracy theory has always struck me as silly. The problem here is that the screen isn’t calibrated correctly, which is an easy fix.

The other reason it bothers me is that there is an actual problem with touchscreen voting machines, and it gets a fraction of the attention of these viral “vote switching” posts.

The problem is that there are some touchscreen voting machines where your vote is stored electronically — and nowhere else. That means if it was hacked somehow, there would be no way to prove it. Thankfully, election officials realized a few years ago that this was a bad idea, and nearly all touchscreen voting machines now come with a paper receipt. If you notice that your paper receipt doesn’t match your intended vote, you can tell a poll worker right then and there. The receipts can also be manually checked during a recount or election audit later.

Problem solved — almost. According to data compiled by Verified Voting, only 1.3% of voting machines are touchscreens without a paper receipt. (The technical term is direct-recording electronic voting machine without a voter-verified paper audit trail, or DRE without VVPAT.) The remainder exists because voting machines are expensive, and they’re usually paid for at the local level.

Still, most states have replaced these machines already. There may be a couple lurking in a rural county somewhere, but there’s really only one state that still has a lot of them in use: Louisiana.

In fact, every single voting machine in Louisiana is a DRE without a paper receipt. To their credit, state lawmakers seem to have recognized the problem and passed laws to replace the machines, but it’s been a slow-moving process with an uncertain price tag. Still, it should be a massive source of embarrassment to the state that they haven’t fixed this yet.

So the next time you see a viral video claiming that votes are being changed, you can be reassured that it’s just a poorly calibrated touchscreen and can’t change the outcome of the election thanks to those paper receipts.

Unless, of course, it’s in Louisiana.

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