You may already have seen the report by the U.S. intelligence community on the 2020 election that dropped this week. The takeaways are alarming, but not surprising: while claims of election machine tampering and vote rigging in the 2020 election were “not credible,” there were very real attempts by foreign actors to undermine our elections – just as we knew there would be.
 
Election security experts have always known that our elections are vulnerable to interference. That’s why Verified Voting works so hard in the period between elections to ensure that when the time comes, election officials have in place the best practices they need to make their elections more resilient and give voters justified confidence in the election results - paper ballots that provide a tangible record of votes cast in an election, and risk-limiting audits to check that the ballots were counted accurately.
 
As we highlighted in our annual report, 2020 was a watershed year for election security – but that work began long before 2020. Verified Voting and our partners worked tirelessly to make sure key states had paper ballots and rigorous audit procedures in place so that we could check the reported election results (check out our work on Georgia’s statewide full hand-count audit here and our audit journey in Pennsylvania here).
 
But despite the threats shown in the report released this week, many states – including emerging battlegrounds like Texas – still use paperless voting systems. And only a few states require the rigorous post-election risk-limiting audits that election experts recommend as a transparent, efficient tool to give public confidence in election outcomes.
 
Preparations for the next election are happening right now – and, unfortunately, those include future attempts to undermine our democracy. Please consider a gift to help us keep working to get paperless voting machines off the market, advocating for jurisdictions to conduct risk-limiting audits, and providing fact-based, non-partisan resources to inform progress toward secure, verifiable elections that the public can trust.
 
With thanks,
The Verified Voting Team