Texas voters experiencing issues with voting machines used in that state have been told by election officials that they are the problem, not the machines. The state says voters are inadvertently touching the machines in ways they shouldn't, causing the machines to alter or delete their vote in the hotly contested senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke.

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The issue in the senate race has occurred when voters chose the option to vote a straight-party ticket—that is, to vote for only candidates from a specified party. Depending on whether the voter indicates they want to vote Democrat or Republican, the machine will automatically populate all races with candidates in the chosen party. But the multiple-page ballot can take several seconds to complete—in Houston the ballot runs 16 pages long. The Secretary of State and county election officials have blamed the issue on voters touching the machines while the systems are still rendering the ballot on screen—thereby inadvertently de-selecting their vote in the critical senate race. They say voters who touch the "enter" button while the system is still filling out the ballot can cause the machine to de-select their chosen candidate or change the vote to the other candidate in the race. ....

Leah McElrath, a freelance writer who specializes in political analysis, is one voter who experienced the problem in Houston. She waited 45 minutes in line to cast her ballot, she told Motherboard in a phone interview, and when she got to the machine, she selected the option to vote a straight-party Democratic ticket. She's positive the first page of the ballot then showed a vote cast for O'Rourke because when she saw the machine highlight his name, she says she did "a happy dance" in her head. But when she got to the review screen at the end of the ballot, she saw that the machine had given her vote to Cruz instead. McElrath says she did manually change some of her selections on the ballot to Republican candidates after the machine filled out her straight-party choices—something the machine allows voters to do—but insists she didn't do this in the senate race.