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Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. Sometimes the old ways are the best when it comes to voting. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Carrie now.

Take a breath. Next year's election is still 18 months away, but it's never too soon to start

thinking about security. Voting systems are a little different to wherever you go,

and the tech has changed over the years from paper ballots to electronic ones to something

in between. Most jurisdictions in the US now use hand-marked paper ballots, or paper ballots marked

with an electronic interface, and counted with optical scanners, or by hand should the need arise.

It's the gold standard for security, says Pam Smith. She's the president and CEO of Verified

Voting, a nonpartisan organization which recently published its recommendations for 2024.

Well, the good news is that most jurisdictions now do have paper ballots that are marked by voters.

In the past, that wasn't always the case. We had paperless equipment that couldn't really be

legitimately recounted or checked. One voter's mark a physical ballot. They're sort of checking

as they go. You're looking for the name of your preferred candidate. You're finding where to

market. You're checking. Make sure you filled all of the bubbles in that you were supposed to.

Voters want to know that their vote is being captured the way they intended, and so you need that

physical ballot, because that's the evidence of voter intent. That's what counts when there's an

audit or a recount of the election. We're in a much better place than we were, and I think that's why

the 2020 election was called the most secure and recent history, because precisely of the fact that

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