# Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machine A **direct recording electronic (DRE)** voting machine records a voter's selections straight into electronic memory. Where no [[Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail]] is attached, the memory is the only record of the vote, and a recount re-reads the same memory with the same software — which is to say there is nothing to recount. DREs were the dominant answer to the punch-card failures of 2000 and have been in retreat since, displaced by hand-marked paper with optical scan and by ballot marking devices. 52 U.S.C. § 21081(a)(2) requires a permanent paper record with manual audit capacity and makes it the official record for any recount, but the requirement took effect 1 January 2006 with no deadline for retiring older equipment and no federal enforcement mechanism. Expand with: remaining paperless deployments by jurisdiction, the 2003–2007 security research that turned the consensus, and state bans. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-01 ASCII map build for [[How a Ballot Is Counted]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] - [[Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail]] - [[Optical Scan Voting System]] - [[How a Voting System Is Certified and Decertified]]