Election security experts and election officials across the political spectrum agree on at least one thing: paper ballots provide a physical record that makes large-scale digital manipulation of election results extraordinarily difficult to accomplish undetected.
The discussion has gained renewed attention as states have continued transitioning from fully electronic voting systems to those that produce a voter-verified paper audit trail. The shift accelerated after security researchers identified vulnerabilities in some direct-recording electronic machines, prompting both Democratic and Republican-led states to require paper ballots as a baseline requirement.
What the Left Is Saying
Progressive election reform advocates argue that mandatory paper ballot requirements represent a bipartisan success story for election integrity. Groups like the Brennan Center for Justice have long advocated for voter-verified paper audit trails as a cornerstone of secure elections, arguing that the physical nature of paper makes it nearly impossible to alter results on a mass scale without detection.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin has noted in congressional hearings that paper ballots provide an essential backstop against both cyberattacks and software errors. 'When you have a paper trail that voters can verify before they cast their ballot, you create accountability at every step of the process,' Durbin said during Senate Judiciary Committee testimony on election security.
Progressive advocacy organizations argue that the push for paper ballots transcends partisan politics because it addresses legitimate concerns about foreign interference and domestic threats to democratic institutions.
What the Right Is Saying
Conservative election integrity advocates have also embraced paper ballot requirements, though they often frame the issue differently. Many Republican secretaries of state championed paper ballot adoption as a way to provide verifiable evidence that can satisfy both campaigns and voters when elections are close.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has pointed to paper ballots as part of a layered approach to election security. 'Having that physical backup gives everyone confidence in the outcome, whether you're voting in a red county or a blue county,' Johnson said during a 2023 Senate hearing on election infrastructure.
The Republican National Committee's election integrity team has highlighted paper trails as evidence that concerns about widespread manipulation are overstated, arguing that existing safeguards make wholesale fraud or hacking extremely difficult to execute undetected.
What the Numbers Show
According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's most recent survey of election practices, 95 percent of registered voters live in jurisdictions that use voting systems with voter-verified paper audit trails. This represents a dramatic increase from 2004, when fewer than 30 percent of votes were cast on systems producing paper records.
A 2023 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that paper ballot audits can reliably detect discrepancies as small as 1 percent in statewide contests when properly conducted. Risk-limiting audits, which use statistical sampling to verify outcomes with high confidence, have been adopted by 14 states as of early 2026.
The Brennan Center estimates that complete replacement of legacy voting equipment across all jurisdictions will cost approximately $400 million per year over a decade, though federal grants have covered significant portions of these upgrades since the Help America Vote Act.
The Bottom Line
Paper ballots represent one of the few areas where election security experts across the ideological spectrum find common ground. The physical nature of paper records means that any successful large-scale manipulation would require both compromising voting machines and altering physical documents at thousands of polling places simultaneously—a logistical hurdle that most security researchers consider effectively insurmountable.
What remains politically contentious is not whether paper ballots improve security, but how audits should be conducted, who should have access to examine the underlying systems, and what happens when paper counts diverge from machine totals. Those debates are likely to continue regardless of consensus on the basic value of maintaining physical records of every vote cast.