The machine counts. The paper is the record. Here is why that matters.

You will be told, this fall, that a machine somewhere flipped votes. The reason you can weigh that claim rather than simply believe it or dismiss it is a piece of paper. Federal law requires every voting system used in a federal election to produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity, one you can check before you cast it, and that paper is the official record for any recount.^[1] In 2024, over 98 percent of election jurisdictions used equipment that has voters mark a paper ballot or produces an auditable paper record.^[2]

A machine claim is not something to argue about. It is something to test. All 50 states and D.C. audit their results after every election, comparing what the machines reported with what the paper says.^[7] The best-known machine claim of the last decade was tested in a courtroom, with experts and discovery, and the court found it false.^[11] Nothing here asks you to trust a machine. It asks you to know where the paper is.

Equipment is chosen by your state and county, not by Washington, across 6,461 local election offices in 2024, which is why a nationwide attack on one system is not a realistic proposition: neighboring counties can run different machines.^[12] The Election Assistance Commission publishes the federal standards, tests systems through laboratories it accredits, certifies them and can decertify them; states decide whether to require federal certification, and many do.^[5][3] Nine companies are registered to submit systems for federal testing as of July 2026, all with United States addresses.^[6] The test labs examine the source code, though federal law bars the commission from publishing it.^[3]

The current federal standard requires a voting system to be incapable of using a wireless network, and federal guidance tells officials never to connect the computer that programs the equipment to the internet.^[3][4] Before every election your county runs a logic and accuracy test: it confirms the right election is loaded, feeds a known pattern of test votes through every ballot position and checks that the totals come out right, and in most places you can go and watch.^[4] Once ballots are cast, they travel in sealed containers with serialized tamper-evident seals, logged with the date, time, seal number and names, signed by two witnesses, often from opposing parties, so no one is ever alone with them.^[9] Federal law then requires every election record to be kept for 22 months.^[10]

Yes, in every state. All 50 states and D.C. conduct some type of post-election audit: some hand-count a fixed percentage of precincts, some compare machine counts to the paper in a random sample, and seven states, Georgia, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Rhode Island and Virginia, require the most rigorous kind, a risk-limiting audit, by statute.^[7] A risk-limiting audit is a statistical hand check of paper records designed to have a high, pre-set chance of catching a wrong reported outcome; Washington's law defines its purpose as limiting the risk of certifying an incorrect result, and in Washington the audit must finish before the county certifies.^[8]

If an audit finds a discrepancy, the paper governs and the state's own procedure takes over.^[8] An audit checks whether the system got the answer right; a recount re-tabulates a specific contest, and 25 states and D.C. order one automatically when a race is close enough.^[13] Results can be changed after certification only through those public, written processes, a recount or an election contest in court, with the paper records available.^[13] The election-night number is unofficial everywhere; the canvass, the audit and certification are what make it final.

In the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, the Delaware Superior Court granted summary judgment to Dominion on the element of falsity on March 31, 2023, finding it crystal clear that none of the statements about Dominion and the 2020 election were true, and recording that Dominion's own expert could find no mechanism to switch votes.^[11] That finding came from the court, on the evidence, before any settlement; a settlement on its own establishes nothing about how an election was run.^[11] Dominion's suit against Mike Lindell ended in a settlement in July 2026, with no finding either way.^[18]

Dominion itself was sold in October 2025 to Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican election official from St. Louis who founded an electronic pollbook company, and renamed Liberty Vote; it kept its Denver headquarters.^[6] The record also shows this: on January 28, 2026 the FBI searched the Fulton County, Georgia elections office and seized roughly 700 boxes of 2020 election materials, including ballots, tabulator tapes and voter rolls.^[16] A seizure is not a finding. No court that has examined the evidence has found that any machine changed a vote in 2020.^[11]

Yes, in measurable ways. No federal agency is in charge of election security; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency offered voluntary services and threat information to state and local offices, and in March 2025 it moved to end its roughly 10-million-dollar-a-year agreement with the Center for Internet Security, which ran the information-sharing hub for election offices. That hub's federal funding is gone.^[14] Federal money for election security comes as grants: 15 million dollars for fiscal 2025 and 45 million for fiscal 2026, each with a 20 percent state match.^[15]

A 2025 executive order directed the commission to rewrite its guidelines around a voter-verifiable paper record and to require re-certification of equipment within 180 days; the commission's power to impose anything on a state is narrow by statute, and the guidelines are voluntary unless a state adopts them.^[17][3] The practical picture is that the security of your election rests, as it did before, on state law, local practice, the paper record and the audit, with less federal support behind it than there was two years ago.