A look at the 14 US states that used paperless voting machines in 2018, which experts say can easily be hacked, and the slow and uneven efforts to replace them
Paperless voting devices are a gaping weakness in the patchwork U.S. election system, security experts say.
Politico
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop that opened well before the 2018 midterms: a 50-state election security survey found only 13 of 40 responding states planned to buy new voting machines, and by September 2018 the infrastructure was still largely unchanged two years after hackers penetrated voter-registration networks (registration network breaches). The Politico piece maps where that inertia landed — fourteen states still voting on paperless devices experts consider trivially hackable.
What makes the slow replacement politically charged is that a fix already exists on paper: the bipartisan Secure Elections Act proposed eliminating paperless machines and mandating routine audits, yet adoption has been uneven across states rather than systemic.
First-order effects
Elections officials and voters in the fourteen paperless-machine states carry the direct exposure: any compromise of those devices would leave no auditable paper record to reconcile against.
Second-order effects
Machine vendors face mounting pressure as states that do replace equipment shift demand toward paper-trail systems, while counties stuck with aging fleets absorb rising maintenance costs on hardware already flagged as obsolete.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, US election integrity increasingly depends on state-by-state procurement decisions rather than federal standards, keeping the patchwork — and its weakest links — in place until legislation like the Secure Elections Act or audit mandates forces uniformity.
The trend: US election infrastructure is converging slowly toward verifiable paper trails, with the pace set by fragmented state budgets and procurement cycles rather than federal mandate.
Today, we're launching a major project that I've been working on for the past five months. It's a page that tracks every state and county using paperless voting machines, including whether they plan to upgrade and where they are in that process. https://www.politico.com/... pic.…
Five of the 14 states (DE, GA, LA, OK, and SC) run centralized processes where the state govt picks voting machines. Here are two examples of how we show those states. (DE was the first of the 14 states to fully upgrade to paper.) pic.twitter.com/te4SUqrJC5
Many months of hard work by @ericgeller @beatricezjin & @JordynHermani went into tracking what states and counties are doing - and aren't - to make voting more secure ahead of 2020. See how your county stacks up. https://www.politico.com/...
We then break down the map of those 14 states by the status of each jurisdiction: upgraded to paper, in the process of upgrading, planning to upgrade, and not planning to upgrade. You'll notice how many counties either don't plan to upgrade or haven't respond to our outreach. pic…
We start by showing you a bunch of national maps, including the 36 states and D.C. that used paper in 2018 and the 14 states that were at least partially paperless. pic.twitter.com/95UGIH5yFZ
The other nine states let counties pick their own voting machines. Tracking those ~600 counties required tons of research, outreach, and prodding. pic.twitter.com/ybs3WvLWwx
Tens of millions of Americans vote in states that use paperless voting machines — devices that security experts say can be undetectably hacked and offer no way to audit the results when errors occur. New Jersey is one of them, via @politico : https://www.politico.com/... pic.twi…
The U.S. faces a voting security crisis - but fixing this problem won't happen quickly. Explore our state-by-state look at the gaping weakness in the patchwork U.S. election system: https://politi.co/2KpgBum
For my Texas story, I spoke to experts in cybersecurity and election administration about why local officials like paperless machines and how that combines with other factors to make replacement difficult. https://www.politico.com/... pic.twitter.com/j0xTcgfXfS
Hundreds of U.S. counties say they can't afford to buy new auditable voting machines, no matter how unsecure their current machines are. https://twitter.com/...