# Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail A **voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT)** is a paper record of a vote that the voter can inspect before casting it, kept apart from the machine's electronic tally. It is the precondition for every meaningful post-election check. Without it there is nothing for a [[Risk-Limiting Audit]] or a recount to examine, and the machine's count cannot be checked against anything. ## What federal law requires, and what it does not The [[Help America Vote Act]] (2002), at 52 U.S.C. § 21081(a)(2)(B), says the system "shall produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity," must let the voter correct errors "before the permanent paper record is produced," and makes that record "available as an official record for any recount." The gap is in what the record has to be. A 2007 Congressional Research Service report put it this way: "HAVA requires a paper audit trail for the voting system, but not paper ballots." A machine's own printed log met the letter of the law, and so did a paper record the voter never saw. That is why fully paperless touchscreens ([[Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machine]]s) stayed legal after HAVA, and why "voter-verified" became a separate demand. ## The Holt bill The fix was **H.R. 811**, Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007. It would have banned paperless machines by November 2008, required a voter-verified paper record and mandated audits. It reached **216 cosponsors** and was reported by the House Administration Committee on May 8, 2007. Then it stalled: it was scheduled for floor votes that September but never brought to the floor, with the National Association of Secretaries of State among the opponents. Paper came instead state by state, through state law and equipment replacement. ## Three kinds of paper - **A DRE printout.** A strip printed behind a window on a touchscreen machine. The electronic record is what gets counted; the paper exists only for audits. - **A BMD-printed ballot.** The paper *is* the ballot that gets counted, but the tabulator usually reads its barcode rather than the text the voter checked. See [[Ballot Marking Device]]. - **A hand-marked paper ballot.** The voter's own marks are both what is verified and what is counted. Only this kind closes the gap that the word "verified" leaves open. See [[Hand-Marked Paper Ballot]]. ## Who is still paperless **Louisiana.** As of March 2026 its in-person machines were 30 to 35 years old and produce no voter-verifiable paper record. The state's roughly **$100M** replacement plan picks a vendor by the end of 2026, deploys in some parishes by spring 2027 and goes statewide about two years after that. So Louisiana's in-person votes in November 2026 will again leave nothing on paper for an audit to check. ## See Also - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] · [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]] · [[Recount Trigger Crosswalk]] - [[Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machine]] · [[Ballot Marking Device]] · [[Hand-Marked Paper Ballot]] - [[Risk-Limiting Audit]] · [[Cast Vote Record]] · [[Verified Voting]]