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President Donald Trump recently repeated his calls for exclusively using paper ballots, lauding them before the first cabinet meeting of his second term. For the sake of honest elections, he said, “We have to go back to paper ballots.”
In reality, the overwhelming majority of the country already uses paper ballots.
Most states use one of two methods: either voters hand-mark a paper ballot that is then read by a machine, or they use a ballot-marking device that prints a summary of their choices on a sheet of paper for verification before it’s fed into a tabulator.
Both are examples of a voter-verified paper trail, a system that blends paper ballots with machine verification and tabulation for accessibility, efficiency, and security.
Election security experts overwhelmingly consider this the gold standard because it ensures that voters can check their selections before casting their ballot, and it creates a physical record that can be used for an audit or recount later if needed.
Using paper ballots, in other words, does not necessarily mean eliminating the use of electronic voting equipment and hand-counting election results. It means doing things the way they are normally done, and ensuring that there’s a paper trail to check for errors.
Estimates vary, but according to Verified Voting more than 95% of U.S. voters already cast their ballots on paper. Before the November presidential election, the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that around 98% of votes cast in that election would be cast on paper, more than four years ago.
The only state that does not use paper ballots statewide? Louisiana — a Republican stronghold that has consistently supported Trump in past elections.
Meanwhile, a handful of counties in states like Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Indiana still use electronic voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. These counties tend to be rural and lack the funds to replace their voting systems. Trump has not proposed any federal funding to support such a transition, leaving these localities without a clear path to comply with his vision.
So what does Trump mean by his call to “go back” to paper ballots? And how far back into the paper era does he really want to go?
Some of his allies appear to believe he means getting rid of all electronic equipment used to mark or count ballots, and that’s what they’re pushing for.
“We will not stop until we have paper ballots counted, and we’re going to melt down all the voting machines and turn them into prison bars,” MyPillow CEO and ardent Trump backer Mike Lindell told ABC News after he was held in contempt of court this month while fighting a defamation case over his false claims about Smartmatic voting machines.
This month, a Georgia state senator proposed a bill that would eliminate voting machines entirely, requiring that ballots be both hand-marked and hand-counted.
“I know many of you listen to everything that President Trump says, and you may have noticed a week or two ago, President Trump asked for paper ballots,” Republican Colton Moore told fellow senators, “and I have a piece of legislation that accomplishes that very thing.
Lindell’s pledge and Moore’s legislation highlight the risks of misunderstanding the system we currently have, or interpreting Trump’s wishes for paper ballots so literally as to mean eliminating scanners entirely in favor of hand counting. I won’t dive into the details here, but Votebeat has repeatedly reported on why hand counting is inefficient, not secure, inaccurate, and extremely costly. It’s fair to wonder whether anyone who advocates such a switch is more interested in creating suspicion about our election system than in improving it.
What a real advocate for election integrity wants is a way for voters to be sure that they are casting the votes they intend to cast, and for election officials to be able to verify that those votes were correctly counted. Those goals are already achieved through the vast majority of existing systems.
There can be political debates about ballot access, election funding, and the infrastructure needed to support secure and efficient voting.
But before we go melting down our voting machines, it’s important to ground this discussion about how we vote in facts. Paper ballots are not a partisan issue. They are a standard election security measure that the country has largely adopted.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.
