What a Philadelphia voting machine looks like when it’s turned on

New York Daily News writer Shaun King has turned his Twitter account into a non-stop over the top advocacy platform for Bernie Sanders, and a couple of days ago he tweeted the following video, with the description: “Philly voters saying polls won’t let them vote for Bernie.”

Philly voters saying polls won’t let them vote for Bernie. This is from: https://t.co/ZaptIgocQ1 pic.twitter.com/uyRRFo8zD7

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) April 26, 2016

Well, I had seen pictures of these types of voting machines before and knew right away that the machine shown in that video was simply not turned on — because there are little red lights next to the names of the candidates when the machine is powered up. The picture at the top of this article is a screen capture from this video, showing how these machines look when operational.

I wasn’t the only person to realize this, of course; lots of folks have experience with these machines, and many people replied to King to let him know the machine was turned off. Including yours truly:

LOL. That machine isn’t turned on. https://t.co/4eIEbKuNxA @ShaunKing

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) April 26, 2016

However, Shaun King simply ignored all these comments and to this date has not retracted or corrected that tweet; he just left it there, implying there was a conspiracy to commit voter fraud for Hillary Clinton’s benefit.

And now the Philadelphia version of the Metro daily paper has a story about this, confirming that yes, the machine was turned off; and not only that, the Sanders supporter who posted the video tweeted by Shaun King — with the comment, “Voter suppression in my own fcking neighborhood” —knew this when he posted his video to Instagram.

Voter machine rejecting Bernie was actually just not turned on.

“Here it is folks. Voter supression in my own f——— neighborhood,” Brooks Bell wrote when he posted the video on Instagram. “Hundreds of people at my location today were told that they couldn’t vote for Bernie.”

However, the machine in the video was not turned on, said City Commissioner Al Schmidt.

“It is a video of someone trying to vote on a machine that isn’t on,” Schmidt said. “If you look at the video, to the left of where the candidates names are, there should be a red light on, indicating that the voter can select one of those candidates. … We looked at it. It’s immediately apparent that the voting machine was off.”

Bell confirmed that, in fact, the voting machine just needed to be reset, and he was able to vote for Sanders later on. But he said problems like this may have obstructed other voters.

“We have computers in our pockets. We’re voting on these rinky-dink machines that have to work two times a year. … They shouldn’t be fraudulent, they shouldn’t be faulty,” he said. “I don’t want to feed into some crazy conspiracy theory about voter suppression, but what I experienced, I just don’t   understand. … There has to be a way to make this an easier process.”

That’s right, folks — he deliberately misled people into thinking the machine had been rigged even though he knew it just needed to be reset, and then Shaun King amplified this claim to his 244,000 Twitter followers, who retweeted it more than 4,300 times. And he still hasn’t corrected it even though he now knows the truth.