Voting Machine Vendor Shifts Gears & Pushes for Backup Paper Ballots

Want to keep electronic voting safe and secure? Make sure that the votes are captured on paper, the CEO of electronic voting systems vendor Election Systems & Software wrote in an op-ed this week.

"Our company, Election Systems & Software, the nation's leading elections equipment provider, recently decided it will no longer sell paperless voting machines as the primary voting device in a jurisdiction," wrote ES&S CEO Tom Burt in his piece in Roll Call.

This is a major shift in the company's public position on voting machine vulnerabilities. 

Burt recommended: Get more money from Congress for better security on a national level; make sure there's a paper trail for audits and recounts; and leverage the things that currently work well.

He also derided one of the factors in the US election system and called it a strength: With more than 10,000 separate voting jurisdictions in the nation, each responsible for choosing its own election products, it would, he wrote, be very difficult for a malicious actor to launch a massive, wide-scale attack on national voting.

For more, read here.