Nothing is wrong with the voting machines in Whitfield County, Georgia, but that’s not what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) would have you believe.
The Republican congresswoman took a flying leap Friday onto a conspiracy bandwagon in claiming that a Whitfield County voter’s “printed ballot had been changed from their selections made on the machine.”
“Good thing they checked their paper ballot before turning it in!” she continued in her post on X. “After several attempts of trying to change it to reflect their correct choices, they had to void the ballot and use a different machine.”
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The report rapidly spread online as Greene went on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, railing about the alleged voter fraud committed in 2020 and “the Dominion machines” that supposedly permitted Democrats to “steal” the election from Donald Trump.
But election officials in Georgia got to work just as quickly to combat Greene’s blatant misinformation. In a Friday press release, the Whitfield County Board of Elections acknowledged that a voter’s selection had not been reflected on her printed ballot, but that the issue “was quickly resolved while the voter was still on-site.”
In an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger addressed the incident and Greene’s posts.
“It got blown out of proportion by people that like to use Twitter and other social media,” he said.
By Wednesday, Greene’s claims had accumulated tens of millions of views via X, Rumble, and more fringe social networks, according to a review by The New York Times. In comparison, the Whitfield County Board of Elections’ release had been shared just 179 times in a post on Facebook.
“There have been no issues reported with the Whitfield County voting machines,” the board clarified in a comment under its press release. “Georgia law allows voters to spoil their printed ballot if they make the wrong selection on the ballot marking device. If a voter requests to change their selections, they are immediately given a new opportunity to mark and print the correct choices.”
Shaynee Bryson, Whitfield County’s election supervisor, told the Times that the incident marked the only such episode among more than 6,000 ballots cast in the county since Oct. 15, when early voting began.
“The machines have been tested,” Bryson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There are checks and balances during voting. They all have to get us the result that everything turned out correctly, and it always does.”
Despite a tsunami of claims by Trump and his allies, no substantive evidence of electronic voting fraud was found in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Dominion Voting Systems, which has faced MAGA World’s fiercest accusations, won a $787.5 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News last April.
In a recent statement on its website, the company said, “The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked. As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue reported in Whitfield County was due to voter error.”
It said that 1.1 million Georgia voters had successfully been able to cast their ballots using Dominion machines as of Saturday.
Greene, for her part, had toned down her inflammatory rhetoric by Monday. In an X post that day, she said she wanted to thank Whitfield County’s election board “for the public transparency and dedicated hard work to election integrity.”
