How the American Ballot Gets Checked: Paper, Audits, and the States That Do It Best

Almost every ballot leaves a paper trail

Start with the simplest fact about an American vote. Around 98 percent of the ballots cast in the 2024 general election were either marked on paper by hand or produced an auditable paper record from the machine the voter used (Brennan Center for Justice, 2024). In some places a voter fills in ovals with a pen. In others a touch screen prints a marked ballot that the voter reads and confirms before it is cast. Either way, a physical object survives the transaction.

That object is the whole point. Software can be doubted, and sometimes should be. A piece of paper the voter reviewed can be pulled from a box weeks later and counted by hand. The country spent roughly two decades replacing paperless machines, and by 2024 the paper record reached nearly every ballot in the nation. The debate over election security often skips past this, so it is worth stating first: the record already exists, in ink, in almost every precinct.

The audit is the second count

A paper record only helps if someone checks it. Forty-eight states require a post-election audit of some kind (Brennan Center for Justice, 2024). Most of those, about 34, run a traditional audit that hand-counts a fixed percentage of precincts or machines and compares the tally to the reported result (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2024). Five states require the newer and more rigorous method, the risk-limiting audit, and a longer list of states have passed enabling legislation or run pilots for it (Verified Voting, 2024; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2024).

A risk-limiting audit is a statistical idea with a plain payoff. Instead of counting a fixed share of ballots, it draws a random sample sized to the margin of the race, then keeps pulling paper until the evidence that the reported winner actually won crosses a set confidence threshold. A blowout needs only a small sample. A squeaker triggers a larger one, and in a true tie it drives all the way to a full hand recount. Colorado ran the first statewide risk-limiting audit in the country in 2017, and Rhode Island became the second in June 2020 (Colorado Secretary of State, 2017; Verified Voting, 2020). Every one of the seven states that decided the 2024 presidential race, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, hand-checked a sample of paper records against the machine totals before certifying (Brennan Center for Justice, 2024).

The index that scores the whole job

Paper and audits are the safeguards. Wait times, registration systems, mail-ballot handling, and provisional-ballot rates are the daily experience of voting, and one measure folds all of it together. The MIT Election Data and Science Lab publishes the Elections Performance Index, a composite that reached a national average near 80 in 2024, up from about 63 in 2008 (MIT Election Data and Science Lab, Elections Performance Index). The share of Election Day voters waiting more than 30 minutes fell to 11 percent in 2024 from 14 percent in 2020, even as turnout ran near 65 percent of eligible voters and more than 158 million ballots were counted (MIT Election Data and Science Lab; U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 2024).

US Political Rank turns that record into a ranking in the states ranked by election administration quality. New Mexico leads the composite at 94, followed by Michigan at 93, Colorado at 92, Vermont at 90, and Nebraska at 89 (US Political Rank, States by Election Administration Quality). Those scores blend the performance index with documented wait times and audit practice, and the states that top them are not clustered in one party's column. Well-run elections are a bipartisan achievement, and the list of the best-run states proves it.

What is settled and what still moves

Some of this is settled beyond argument. Paper records and post-election audits are now close to universal, the index that measures administration has climbed for sixteen years, and the states that run elections best include red states and blue states alike. A voter who wants to know whether the count can be checked has a clear answer: in 48 states, by law, it is.

Some of it still moves. The risk-limiting audit is the strongest verification method available, and only five states require it so far, so the honest question is how fast the rest adopt it. The balance between federal direction and state control over voter rolls is genuinely contested, and reasonable people land in different places on it. Turnout, tracked in the states ranked by voter turnout, still varies widely from one state to the next. The argument over elections will continue, as it should in a republic. It runs, now, over a ballot that almost always leaves a paper trail and a count that almost always gets a second look.