National: Three states responsible for half of all paperless e-voting machines in 2018, survey finds | Derek B. Johnson/FCW
Lawmakers and election security experts have focused much of their energies over the past two years on doing away with paperless Direct Recording Electronic voting machines. While such machines are not inherently more vulnerable to being hacked than other types of voting equipment, information security experts say they represent a unique threat because if compromised, they have no backup paper trail that officials can use in audits to detect discrepancies and determine an accurate vote count. Survey results from the Election Assistance Commission showed that just three states — Pennsylvania, Georgia and Texas — were responsible for more than half of all DRE voting machines without voter verified paper trails used across the nation in 2018. The latest Election Administration and Voting Survey released June 27 also showed that 202,599 of the nation’s 334,422 voting machines used in the 2018 election were DRE machines. About one third (67,535) of those machines had paper backups in place, but 135,064 did not.