A look at Secure Elections Act bill, proposed by a bipartisan group of US senators, which aims to eliminate paperless voting machines and promote routine audits
or new voting systems to be in place by November 2020. http://arstechnica.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The introduction of the Secure Elections Act with a proposed $386M appropriation was an early congressional response to election-security fears heading into 2018 and 2020, targeting the paperless voting machines still running in a sizable group of states. The Politico follow-up on the 14 US states that used paperless voting machines in 2018 shows how slow replacement proved even after federal money was on the table.
First-order effects
- States still running paperless voting systems face a funding-and-deadline squeeze: the bill ties $386M in federal grants to replacing vulnerable machines and adopting routine audits by November 2020.
- Voting equipment vendors whose product lines lack paper trails would have to redesign or retire those systems to qualify for federally funded procurements.
Second-order effects
- Where legislatures move too slowly, courts fill the gap — as Georgia learned when a federal judge ordered a fallback to paper ballots for 2020 if its electronic system was not replaced, shifting pressure from Congress onto state procurement offices.
- Vendors gain an incentive toward transparency as a sales argument: the later opening of major manufacturers' software and hardware to researcher stress-testing shows audits becoming a market differentiator, not just compliance.
Third-order effects
- If the audit-plus-paper-trail standard holds, US elections structurally converge on verifiable physical records as the trust anchor, with vendors like Clear Ballot building businesses around checking paper ballots amid hacking conspiracies — and federal grant money becoming the lever that dictates state equipment cycles.
The trend: US election infrastructure is moving from opaque proprietary machines toward paper-anchored, routinely audited systems, pushed by federal funding, litigation, and post-election conspiracy pressure.