State Senator Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville) called on Tennessee officials to address complaints from Davidson County voters who claim electronic voting machines are incorrectly selecting U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and only reflecting their choice for the Democratic Party candidate after multiple attempts.
“Obviously, this keeps coming up and it needs to be addressed after this election, because it’s not acceptable that people are having these problems,” said Campbell on Friday, according to The Tennessee Lookout.
While calling for officials to act after the election, the outlet reported that Campbell said she is confident the complaints result from “user error” rather than “foul play” after speaking with officials at the Davidson County Election Office.
“I don’t think it’s indicative of any foul play,” Campbell reportedly said. “I feel confident having talked to them that it’s user error.”
Tennessee Elections Coordinator Mark Goins confirmed his office received a report of the issue last Wednesday, when he told WSMV the matter was caused by an “unintentional touch” of the screen on an electronic voter machine.
Davidson County Election Administrator John Richardson told WPLN that polling sites now offer plastic straws to voters to reduce the sensitive touch-screen issue, which has reduced the number of complaints his office has fielded. Chad Gray, Williamson County’s elections administrator, has similarly said styluses are available.
While Campbell said election officials should work to ease voters’ concerns about the machines this year, a 2022 blog post she published during her congressional campaign against U.S. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05) challenged Republicans for criticizing voting machines.
“Andy Olges [sic] even slammed a voting machine company named by Donald Trump,” wrote Campbell in her September 2022 blog post, which included links to national news coverage that said exposed Ogles “for spreading Trump’s lies about election fraud.”
Ogles was referring to the voting machines previously used in Williamson County, which the county replaced with new hardware from the same company used in neighboring Davidson County after Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Goins urged the Williamson County Election Commission to stop using the previous technology in 2022.
According to the letter, the machines Ogles referenced later produced an election “where the tapes from several scanners did not match the number of votes cast, but the centrally tabulated results contained all of the results.”
Democrats in Shelby County previously questioned the accuracy of voting machines in 2024, when the late State Representative G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) and State Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis) expressed concerns about “vote defaulting” in an emergency press conference.
According to Action News 5, the allegations were that “voters selected one candidate, only for the machine to switch the selection to a different candidate, no matter how many times the voter attempted to reselect their choice candidate.”
Parkinson reportedly said at the time, “It sounds like a calibration issue to me.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for American elections to return to paper ballots, including at a Kansas rally earlier this month.
“I’d rather have you have all paper ballots, by the way,” said Trump. “It’s a lot better, save a lot of money.”
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Tom Pappert is a 2025 recipient of the Dao Prize and the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star. He also reports for the Star News Network. Follow Tom on X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Heidi Campbell” by Heidi Campbell. Background Photo “Voters” by Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0.
