In an era rife with concerns about cybersecurity, election officials are increasingly turning to a decidedly low-tech solution: paper. While security advocates have long considered use of paper a best practice for election integrity, the pace of its adoption has accelerated in the wake of Russian meddling in the U.S. election in 2016. City and county governments around the country and a handful oif states, so far, have moved to replace electronic voting methods with paper ballots or to adopt electronic voting machines that generate paper receipts. Virginia last year, just two months before its state election, phased out all its old electronic touch-screen machines after a demonstration at a hacking conference spotlighted vulnerabvilities in its electronic voting machines. Voters across the state cast paper ballots on election day. In Kentucky and Pennsylvania, meanwhile, state officials have ordered that all new voting equipment have a paper trail.
… Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has long advocated for paper systems or backups, adds, “The value of having the voter-marked paper ballot is that it allows you to detect if something happened and to recover from it.”
Ms. Schneider, a former Pennsylvania election official, says that interest in election security has increased among local officials and the public at large. “I haven’t seen anything like it the whole time people have been working and advocating against these vulnerable machines,” she says. “So that’s a good thing, that the issue has been elevated in the consciousness of the press and the public.”
Full Article: Remember the Age of Paper Ballots? It’s Back – WSJ.