From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:
For election systems, that means ensuring that a voter‐verified physical ballot—an auditable paper trail—exists for every vote cast. Manual counts of a sample of those paper ballots, known as risk‐limiting audits, can then be used to confirm that the digital tallies are accurate.
Happily, many states have heeded the advice of experts in recent years, implementing routine audits and replacing direct‐recording electronic, or DRE, machines, an antiquated technology in which touch screens record choices without creating a paper ballot for the voter to inspect. Yet several states that have done virtually everything right, many at the urging of Republican officials previously seen as Trump allies, have found themselves at the center of conspiracy theories.
Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan have successfully replaced their DRE machines—meaning every voter either hand‐marks a ballot or is presented with a printed paper record of their selections to verify—and implemented risk‐limiting audit programs. In Pennsylvania, this involved a Herculean effort: As recently as 2018, the majority of the state’s voters cast ballots with no paper trail. Michigan, meanwhile, had a slight head start, approving a major initiative to update its voting equipment back in 2017.
In practice, these changes make electronic “vote rigging” on the scale necessary to shift the outcome of a statewide election highly infeasible, especially when the margin of victory is tens of thousands of votes. Multiple hand recounts in Georgia, unsurprisingly, turned up no evidence of digital shenanigans.
