America’s complicated history with EVMs, and why the country almost stopped using them exclusively

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) have been at the heart of modernizing voting processes worldwide, including in the US and India. However, their journey has been fraught with issues that highlight both the promise and pitfalls of digital voting. The US, once heavily reliant on EVMs, has pulled back significantly in recent years, largely due to concerns about security and transparency. This shift provides an intriguing comparison to India’s continued reliance on EVMs, even as the country incorporates additional checks like Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPAT) to strengthen trust in the system.

The US’s love-hate relationship with EVMs

The history of voting machines in the United States goes back over a century, with early mechanical voting machines (lever systems) introduced in the late 1800s and dominating for much of the 20th century. Later came punch-card systems, which became infamous after the 2000 election’s “hanging chad” debacle in Florida, where authorities had to painfully and manually recount the votes over weeks. Following that crisis, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, pushing states to replace outdated voting systems with modern, computerised Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines, believing they would improve accessibility and accuracy.

However, these touchscreen DRE machines introduced new problems. By 2016, revelations about foreign hacking attempts on voter databases and research highlighting vulnerabilities in DRE software underscored the need for better security and transparency. A major turning point came with the 2020 presidential election and subsequent unfounded accusations of fraud, which amplified public distrust in purely electronic voting systems. Today, around 95% of American voters use systems with a paper trail to back up their votes, typically through optical scanners that read paper ballots and enable auditability, while only a small fraction of jurisdictions still use paperless EVMs.

Adding paper trails

In both the US and India, ensuring vote integrity has become central to the discussion around EVMs. While India was slower to adopt VVPAT, being trialled for the first time in the 2014 General Elections, this feature now serves a role similar to the hybrid systems the US has embraced, enabling verification and recounts if discrepancies arise. VVPAT, which prints a paper record of each vote that voters can see, was introduced by the Election Commission of India to build trust and create a tangible trail for audit purposes.
The US, in contrast, leans more heavily on optical scan machines, which directly scan paper ballots filled out by voters, leaving a clear, physical record from the outset. This trend gained momentum as DRE vulnerabilities were exposed; touchscreens without paper verification were phased out across much of the country. States like Virginia and Pennsylvania, for example, moved away from pure DREs after facing issues with hacked machines and machine malfunctions.

Different paths, shared concerns

While the US and India have approached voting technology differently, the challenges they face — such as security, transparency, and logistical concerns — are strikingly similar. In the US, outdated EVM infrastructure remains an issue, with hundreds of voting districts still using machines from over a decade ago, creating risks tied to malfunction, lack of parts, and security flaws. These problems are mitigated somewhat by the hybrid model (optical scanning with paper ballots), which ensures that even if a machine malfunctions, votes can still be counted manually.
In India, EVMs have faced skepticism from opposition parties, with doubts raised over potential tampering and the lack of a physical vote count. While the introduction of VVPAT has helped address some of these concerns, experts argue that the level of transparency in Indian elections could benefit from further measures. The presence of VVPAT helps create an auditable trail, but questions remain about the random sampling method used in verifying these paper trails.

As technology advances, both countries continue to refine their approaches to electronic voting, adapting to meet the demands of secure, reliable, and transparent elections. The US experience, however, offers a lesson on the importance of hybrid systems, especially when voter confidence is paramount in safeguarding democracy.