Virginia State Board of Elections votes to remove touchscreen voting machines before November elections, saying they pose unacceptable digital risks
a subtle hint that they might want to follow suit. Brian Klaas / @brianklaas : This should be replicated nationwide. Paper ballots are far superior for election security. Machines with no paper trail are unacceptable. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The vote is the payoff of a long-documented problem: Ars Technica reported back in 2015 that [[a:828334|Virginia's e-voting systems ran on hard-coded passwords, trivial Wi-Fi security, and unpatched operating systems]], and Bloomberg followed in 2016 with the case that these buggy, obsolete machines often cause more problems than they solve. With November approaching, the State Board of Elections has converted that record into a directive: touchscreen machines come out, counties fall back to paper.
What makes this a marker rather than a one-off is what came after it — by 2019, Politico counted 14 US states still using paperless machines that experts say are easily hacked, and a federal judge ordered Georgia onto paper ballots for 2020 unless it replaced its system. Virginia moved earliest and unilaterally, which is why security advocates like Brian Klaas immediately framed it as a template for nationwide replication.
First-order effects
- Virginia counties must pull touchscreen machines from service and run the November elections on paper ballots, absorbing the cost and logistics of an abrupt swap weeks out from Election Day.
- Voters in affected jurisdictions lose direct-recording electronic voting entirely, shifting every ballot to a hand-marked or optically scanned paper record.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling paperless DRE machines lose credibility and market access in Virginia, pushing procurement toward systems that produce voter-verifiable paper trails.
- Officials in the remaining paperless states face intensified public and legal pressure to follow — a dynamic the Georgia court ruling later confirmed rather than created.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, a verifiable paper trail becomes the de facto baseline requirement for US voting systems, with election-security risk displacing convenience as the primary procurement criterion.
- The episode also sets up a tension visible in later coverage: while states retreat from insecure hardware, initiatives like West Virginia's smartphone voting for disabled voters push digital ballots back in through a different door.
The trend: US election administration is moving away from paperless touchscreen machines toward voter-verifiable paper records, with Virginia's pre-2017 withdrawal as the early template and litigation and state-by-state replacement driving the rest.