The US still uses paper ballots for its polls. Here's why

Election Day has arrived in America.

Though a majority of the votes for US president have not yet been cast, Donald Trump has spent the past few months complaining about voter fraud and claiming that the election is rigged.

Trump has spent rally after rally exhorting supporters to to deliver a victory “too big to rig.”

He has claimed that the only way he can lose is if Democrats cheat.

He has refused to say, repeatedly, whether he will accept the results regardless of the outcome. And he’s claimed cheating is already underway, citing debunked claims or outrageous theories with no basis in reality.

“The only thing that can stop us is the cheating. It’s the only thing that can stop us,” Trump said at an event in Arizona late Thursday night.

Trump’s allies have toed the same line.

Billioniare Elon Musk, who has openly backed Trump, at a town hall in Pennsylvania claimed that voting machines were ‘too easy to hack’ and that paper ballots are unneeded.

Even though America, like most other nations, still uses paper ballots.

But have you ever wondered why this is the case?

Let’s take a closer look:

Bush vs Gore

According to Indian Express, till the year 2000, the US was using paper ballots with punch-card voting machines.

That election between George W Bush and Al Gore, as observers know, and its results were disputed.

It gave the world the famous with the ‘hanging chads’ – which local officials in Florida spent their days looking closely at – which were attached to ballots.

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These paper chads were to be punched by voters to indicate their chosen candidate. Instead, it caused chaos and the election only ended with the Supreme Court halting the recount in Florida and handing the election to George W Bush.

In 2002, America passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

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The government also put aside billions of dollars to buy new equipment – including direct recording electronic (DRE) machines, where there is no paper trail.

But the big change to paperless voting simply didn’t happen.

By 2006, the share of registered voters using paperless machines had surged, though hand-marked paper ballots that are later scanned by electronic tabulators remained the most popular.

For the next decade, about a third of all votes were cast on DRE machines.

By 2014, around 25 per cent of voters were living in areas using paperless equipment, as per BrennanCenter.org.

Then came 2016, when Russia attempted to use social media campaigns to divide Americans by race and extreme ideology and influence the election.

Game change in 2016

Derek Tisler, counsel with the Elections and Government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy think-tank, told Reuters this changed the way America votes.

“The biggest priority was to say if something went wrong, we need to be able to identify that something went wrong, and we need to be able to correct it and ultimately make sure that we got the results correct, and that’s where more and more we saw the shift back to paper,” Tisler said.

With the aid of over $800 million in federal funding, states rapidly moved away from these outdated systems.

By the 2022 mid-terms, around 70 per cent of all registered voters were still using hand-marked paper ballots.

Around 23 per cent of registered voters were living in areas using ballot marking devices – which allow voters to choose their candidate electronically as well as produce a paper record.

Just seven per cent of all registered voters use DREs – which store votes in their memory.

That figure has only declined in recent years.

Today, almost all still use machines to tabulate the paper ballots.

BrennanCenter.org quoted data from Verified Voting and the Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey as showing that 98 per cent of all votes will be cast on paper ballots in the 2024 presidential election.

In 2020, that number was at 93 per cent.

Most importantly, all the swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — use voting systems with paper trails.

Paper ballots also help conduct postelection audits – which are mandated in 48 states.

These are used by officials to check the accuracy of the machines.

In swing state, election officials hand-count a sample of paper records and compare them to electronic counts – which confirms whether or not the total is accurate.

Trump and his allies, meanwhile, have falsely claimed that tabulators in some 2020 races were manipulated.

They are pushing for the machines to be ditched entirely and for the ballots to be counted by hand, which election officials say is a logistical non-starter.

Their claims have been thoroughly investigated and debunked.

Voting equipment companies like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic have sued Trump’s allies as well as pro-Trump media personalities and networks over false claims of election fraud, including one allegation that their machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden.

Dominion won a settlement from Fox News of $787 million.

The settlement came just as opening statements were supposed to begin, abruptly ending a case that had embarrassed Fox News over several months and raised the possibility that network founder Rupert Murdoch and its stars such as Tucker Carlson (since jettisoned) and Sean Hannity would have to testify publicly.

CNN quoted  a majority of Trump supporters in the swing states of Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania as saying they are “not at all confident” or only “just a little” confident the election results will be accurate.

What do experts say?

Experts say such claims of inaccurate counts are absurd.

“It’s really weird and I don’t understand it,” Mark Lindeman, Verified Voting’s director for policy and strategy told CNN. “Almost everybody votes on paper ballots. Anyone who is convinced that we need paper ballots is very likely voting on paper ballots themselves.”

“Twenty years ago, Verified Voting was founded to get rid of paperless (voting machines),” Lindeman added. “And now we’ve just about made it. We’re wondering why everybody isn’t happier. We’ve done this incredible thing together as a country.”

They add that paper ballots come in particularly handy when it comes to ensuring that the election’s outcome is correct.

As Douglas Jones, a retired University of Iowa computer science professor who spent decades studying the use of computers in elections, told Reuters “The point of using paper is to have a chain of evidence you can use to test the correctness of the count.”

“The point of using scanners is to mechanise the count so you avoid as many clerical errors as possible.”

“If there is any doubt about the accuracy of electronic counts, election officials can fall back on the paper record for confirmation,” the BrennanCenter.org piece noted.

With inputs from agencies

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