Dear State Election Officer:  Petition to Louisiana’s State Election Board for Paper Ballot Elections

We the undersigned, respectfully petition the State Election Board to immediately require the use of hand-marked paper ballots beginning in the November 2018 election.

Louisiana uses direct recording electronic machines (DREs) without any paper trail.  DREs have proven to be easily hackable. If there is a contested election, altering of votes, or any type of breach, there is no way to verify the state’s elections results.  Paper ballots allow for an opportunity to count and audit election results. 

In the age of unprecedented hacking risks, researchers have found that electronic voting infrastructure — including voting machines and registration databases — have serious vulnerabilities.  Just replacing or upgrading election infrastructure is not sufficient. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its recommendations on election security and concluded that requiring paper ballots, banning wireless components and implementing statistically sound audits of election results are essential safeguards.

We request that you follow the practices identified by these and other leading experts for election security:

(1) Replace paperless voting machines with systems that have hand marked paper ballots — a physical record of the vote that is out of reach from cyberattacks. Paper ballots cannot be hacked.

(2) Conduct robust post-election audits in federal elections. Congress explicitly requested that states “implement a post-election audit system that provides a high-level of confidence in the accuracy of the final vote tally” as part of its report language accompanying the Omnibus. Well-designed audits involve election officials checking only a small random sample of the voters’ choices on paper ballots so that they can quickly and affordably provide high assurance that the election outcome was accurate.

(3) Upgrade systems to ensure that states’ election websites, statewide registration
systems, and election night reporting systems are defended against threats of intrusion and manipulation.

(4) Prohibit wireless connectivity in voting machines to limit vulnerabilities to hacking risks.

(5) Train and educate election officials at all levels on how they need to incorporate
security into their elections practices.