The real election tech vulnerabilities in 2026

In Louisiana, one state remains a holdout, utilizing paperless voting machines statewide on Election Day. These machines allow voters to select candidates via buttons, recording choices electronically without generating a physical paper ballot.

This lack of an independent paper record raises concerns about whether votes were tallied accurately. Most other states have discarded these machines after researchers revealed vulnerabilities related to hacking and the inability to audit results independently.

Election security experts emphasize that voter-marked paper ballots paired with thorough audits represent the highest standard for elections that people can trust.

Philip Stark, a retired UC Berkeley statistics professor who developed an audit protocol for checking paper ballots, clarified a key distinction at a recent conference. He stated, "A vulnerability is not an exploit," adding, "You can leave a key under your doormat, and that doesn't mean someone takes the key and opens your door."

Ballot-marking devices (BMDs) allow voters to choose candidates on a touchscreen before a paper ballot is printed. Experts caution that these devices are susceptible to errors and hacking, and studies indicate voters frequently miss mistakes on the printed output.

A demonstration at the Def Con conference in 2025 showed how a machine from Georgia could be manipulated by altering what a voter sees or by changing the tally, using access granted through court sanction. Blake Evans, executive director for Georgia's secretary of state office, responded to questions about these exposures by saying, "[W]e do have the physical security with the fields and the counties that store their equipment securely in secure places."

Research from Princeton University uncovered a software flaw in Georgia's vote-counting system that could potentially reveal how individual voters cast their ballots. Researcher Max Springer used public voter records and about $20 in AI credits to reconstruct the casting order of nearly all in-person ballots in the counties he examined.

Researchers first identified this bug in 2022, and Dominion Voting Systems (now Liberty Vote) issued a patch the following year, while approximately 21 states were using the software. The Georgia secretary of state's office noted that "there haven't been any significant software updates since 2019."

Liberty Vote asserts in a website post that every "Liberty Vote system is tested, certified, and verified to meet the highest standards of election security and reliability in accordance with all applicable state and federal requirements."

Ultimately, Stark advises voters to understand two concurrent realities: "The systems are garbage from a software and cybersecurity point of view. There's lots of ways that they can fail," yet "there is no direct evidence that anything has happened on a large scale that changed the outcome of say the presidential election or federal election."