Voter-verified paper audit trail
A VVPAT allows voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results.
While VVPAT has gained in use in the United States compared with ballotless voting systems without it, hand-marked ballots are used by a greater proportion of jurisdictions.
Auditable paper ballots make it more difficult for voting machines to corrupt records without human intervention.
Depending on election laws, the paper audit trail may constitute a legal ballot and therefore provide a means by which a manual vote count can be conducted if a recount is necessary.
Because of this, critics claim there is an increased chance for electoral fraud or malfunction and security experts, such as Bruce Schneier, have demanded voter-verifiable paper audit trails.
[7] In the U.S., 98.5 percent of registered voters live in jurisdictions offering some form of paper ballot, whether hand-marked or VVPAT.
[8] In 1897, responding to a question from Rhode Island Governor Charles W. Lippitt about the legality of using the newly-developed McTammany direct-recording voting machine,[9] Associate Justice Horatio Rogers of the Rhode Island Supreme Court noted that a voter casting a vote on such a machine without a written record "has no knowledge through his senses that he has accomplished a result.
[12] The Mercuri method, as some have called it, was refined in her Ph.D. dissertation in October 2000; in her final version, the paper record is printed behind glass so that the voter may not take it or alter it.
Voter-verifiable paper audit trail was first used in an election in India in September 2013 in Noksen (Assembly Constituency) in Nagaland.
[17][18][19][20] VVPAT was implemented in Lucknow, Gandhinagar, Bangalore South, Chennai Central, Jadavpur, Raipur, Patna Sahib and Mizoram constituencies.
At the Trump campaign's request, this was followed by a full statewide hand recount of the paper ballots, which confirmed the result.
[34] Starting in 2002 with the statewide adoption of DREs and as recently as the 2016 election, the lack of a system producing auditable paper ballots would have made a recount impossible.
The VVPAT system allowed officials to cross-check electronic results with paper records, confirming the accuracy of the final vote count[35] and refuting claims by President Trump in a January 2, 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that the count was inaccurate.
In additional to providing transparency, Georgia's new VVPAT system helped counter a strong disinformation campaign by facilitating a total of three cross-confirming counts—initial vote, audit, and hand recount.
[40] In June 2018, Election Commission of India introduced a built-in-hood on top of the contrast sensor and paper roll that does not soak humidity in all VVPATs to prevent it from excess light and heat.
[49] Another security concern is that a VVPAT could print while no voter is observing the paper trail, a form of ballot stuffing.
For the voter, the printed record is "in a different format than the ballot, in a different place, is verified at a different time, and has a different graphical layout with different contrast and lighting parameters.
"[52] In November 2003 in Wilton, CT, virtually all voters had to be prompted to find and verify their receipt, increasing the time required to vote and the work for the pollworkers.
[52] In addition, a VVPAT component may not be easily usable by poll-workers, many of whom are already struggling with DRE maintenance and use and new elections law requirements.
Because both sets of records independently established the order of electronic ballots cast, they directly linked a voter's identification to his or her preference.
Also problematic is that voters are not required to actually check the paper audit before casting a ballot, which is critical to "verifying" the vote.
The vendor may not have developed a VVPAT component that is compatible with the DRE machine in use, thus requiring the jurisdiction to purchase an entirely new voting system.
For jurisdictions not currently using DRE machines, the introduction of a new voting system that includes a VVPAT component would have less implementation challenges.
Others have suggested that random audits of direct recording electronic voting machines be performed after the election or only in the event of a dispute.
