‘It’s a lie’: Georgia election official forcefully pushes back on false claims of voting machine fraud

With early voting underway in the key battleground state of Georgia, a top election official in the state forcefully pushed back Wednesday on false claims of voting machine fraud — a debunked conspiracy theory that proliferated after the 2020 presidential election and has now been revived by some prominent Republican figures.

“[There is] zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top official on the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “That claim was a lie in 2020 and it’s a lie now.”

Sterling, in his comments, called out “certain congresspeople” — appearing to reference Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently pushed an unsubstantiated allegation that a Georgia resident’s early vote had been switched by a voting machine.

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Greene, in an interview and social media post, shared an unidentified Whitfield County voter’s claim that a voting machine had printed their ballot with a different selection than the one they had made on the machine — a claim that local officials said was simply a case of human error.

“Humans make mistakes. They’re called mistakes for a reason,” Sterling wrote in a post on X. “This issue is human/user error, always will be. Whitfield Co. handled it & voter voted.”

In her tweet about the alleged incident, Greene told her followers to “please double check your printed ballot” before turning it in, and noted that “we vote on Dominion voting machines” — a reference to the voting machine company that was the target of numerous false conspiracy theories in 2020.

Greene pushed the same claims in an interview last week with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, according to a clip posted online, claiming the machine “kept on switching the votes” of that voter.

“It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020,” Greene said of the incident, which occurred in her district, again noting Georgia’s use of Dominion machines.

X owner Elon Musk — who, like Greene, is a supporter of former President Donald Trump — made similar conspiracy theory claims while speaking at a town hall in Pennsylvania last week.

Dominion, in the wake of the 2020 election, filed a series of defamation lawsuits after it became the center of a false conspiracy theory that voting machines had rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden. Last year the company settled its landmark defamation suit against Fox News for a $787 million. The other suits are still ongoing.

In a statement, Dominion pushed back on Greene’s new claim.

“The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked,” a Dominion spokesperson said. “As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue in Whitfield County was due to voter error. The county provided the voter with an opportunity to mark and print a new ballot with their correct choices and the issue was quickly resolved.”

In a press release, the Whitfield County Board of Elections said there was no issue with the voting machine, and that this was “the only incident among over 6,000 ballots cast.”

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“If we had reason to suspect that the machine was in error, we would have immediately taken the machine out of service,” the statement said. “No machines have been taken out of service.”

The statement noted that Georgia law allows voters to void their printed ballot “if they make the wrong selection on the ballot marking device.”

Greene, responding to a separate Facebook post by the election board, thanked the poll workers for “resolving the issues” and defended their work, writing that it is “not their fault.”

“They don’t make the Georgia state election laws and they are just doing their jobs,” Greene said of the poll workers.

Speaking at the press conference on Wednesday, Sterling said the “main situation” they have encountered includes “elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it.”

“Anyone claiming machines are flipping votes are lying or don’t research,” Sterling wrote in a post on X last week.