What is the easiest way to cast doubt on an election? By telling voters that casting a ballot for the candidate who is the opposite of their choice is actually the way to vote for the candidate they want. It may sound too strange to be true, but that is what happened in a judicial race in Northampton, Pennsylvania.
Northampton experienced an eerie case of déjà vu during its most recent election. In 2019, the Philadelphia suburb had faced glitches with its touchscreen voting machines on Election Day, causing machines to undercount the votes for one candidate. This year, glitches struck again, causing ballot printouts to reflect a different result than the one voters selected on the machine.
Northampton County officials stated that the error did not affect election results because the vote is not counted based on the printout. Instead, a barcode on the printout documents the official vote. However, it is unclear how much the confusion over the printouts changed voter behavior.
One election observer at the Wesley United Methodist Church reported that election officials told voters to select the opposite candidate on the machine to produce the correct candidate on the printout. Although election officials eventually began warning voters that their vote would show up incorrectly on the printout, incorrect instructions could have affected the count in a way that would be impossible to verify or rectify.
It was also reported that some voters were turned away from polling locations because of the error, and others had
