Marjorie Taylor Greene says Dominion voting machines flipped votes in Georgia. That’s Pants on Fire!

With early voting underway in many states, one elected official is resurrecting false claims from 2020 about voting machines switching votes.

In an Oct. 18 X post, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., shared a secondhand account of a Whitfield County, Georgia, voter who said the printed version did not reflect that voter’s selections.

"Reports from Whitfield County, GA that Dominion machines are flipping votes," Greene wrote.  "This is exactly the kind of fraud we saw in 2020."

A screenshot she shared showed someone making the claim that "a family friend" reported voting in Whitfield County, in north Georgia, and discovering that the voting machine printout didn’t reflect the voter’s correct choices. 

"After several attempts for correction they voided that ballot and machine and he had to revote on another machine!" the message read.

(Screenshot from X)

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones featured Greene’s claim on his show the same day, publishing a video of Greene saying she’d just heard the report. "This is something we are just starting to look into today because I just found out about it this morning before I came on your show," Greene said.

"BREAKING: MTG Investigating Reports of Votes Being Flipped In Georgia," The Alex Jones Show headline read. But local and state officials, as well as Dominion Voting Systems, were quick to debunk Greene’s claim that an incident in Whitfield County showed Dominion voting machines were "flipping votes."

First, we’ve seen this claim before — in 2020. It wasn’t true then and there’s no evidence for it now.

Whitfield County election officials said they knew of one reported instance in which a voter’s printed ballot did not reflect the desired choices, but it was not because the voting machine flipped the selections — and it did not represent a systemic problem involving the voting machines.

"This issue was quickly resolved while the voter was still on-site," the Whitfield County Board of Elections wrote Oct. 18 on its Facebook page, reminding voters to double-check their ballots before feeding them to the scanners. 

In a follow-up press release, the Board of Elections said the voter saw that the printed ballot did not reflect the correct choices and alerted a poll worker, who helped the voter fill out another ballot with the desired choices. Georgia allows voters to request another ballot if they make a mistake while filling one out.  

The board said it was the only incident among more than 6,000 Whitfield County ballots cast in person since Oct. 15. 

Shaynee Bryson, Whitfield County’s elections supervisor, told PolitiFact the incident happened because of "user error." She said that as of 2:30 p.m. Oct. 22, more than 10,000 voters in the county had cast their ballots "with no issues." Bryson said they had received no other voters’ complaints.

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"We have taken no machines out of service, as we have no reason to suspect the machines are in error," Bryson said. She also told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that no Whitfield County voter has canceled more than one ballot this year.

Although Greene shared the Whitfield County Board of Elections’ press release in an Oct. 21 X post, she did not clearly walk back her claim. PolitiFact reached out to Greene but did not receive a response.

"Anyone claiming machines are flipping votes are lying or don't research," Georgia Secretary of State Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling wrote on X Oct. 18.  "This issue is human/user error, always will be. Whitfield Co. handled it & voter voted."

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told CBS News’ "Face the Nation" on Oct. 20 that the incident had been "blown out of proportion" on X and that it revealed no evidence of fraud.

"The equipment's working," Raffensperger said. "We've done all sorts of audits, you know, since the last election and coming up to this election."

Numerous audits, investigations and lawsuits revealed there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won. States certified the results. Congress accepted the results. Former President Donald Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits claiming otherwise. A group of conservatives, including former federal judges, examined every fraud and miscount claim by Trump and concluded that they "failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results."

A monitor showing Dominion Voting Image Cast Central display tab is seen as Cobb County Election officials count ballots on a machine, Nov. 24, 2020, in Marietta, Ga. (AP)

In an Oct. 19 update on its website, Dominion Voting said the claim that voting machines can switch votes is "false" and "has been repeatedly debunked."

"As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue reported in Whitfield County was due to voter error," its update read. "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."

Speaking for Dominion, Penta Group Managing Director for Strategy Stephanie Walstrom told PolitiFact that 1.6 million voters in Georgia have "successfully cast their vote with a voter-verifiable paper ballot using Dominion machines" during early voting.

Following the 2020 election, Dominion was the target of a barrage of false claims fueled by Trump’s supporters. They argued that the company’s voting technology had rigged the 2020 presidential election against Trump, but PolitiFact and other fact-checkers examined many of the claims and found them meritless.

Dominion sued Fox News over defamation for endorsing, repeating, and broadcasting these falsehoods. In April 2023, Fox settled with Dominion, agreeing to pay the election technology company $787.5 million. Fox acknowledged "the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false."

There’s no evidence that Dominion voting machines flipped votes in Whitfield County, Georgia. And the statement that what happened at one of the county’s election sites amounted to "the kind of fraud we saw in 2020" is baseless; mountains of evidence show 2020 saw no widespread fraud and election officials said this case was one of user error. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird, PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman and Staff Writer Sara Swann contributed to this report.