The hot new technology in voting machines is paper.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jammale. DRE is the acronym in election speak that stands for direct recording electronic voting machines

the kind that record votes directly into a computer's memory often with no paper trail

and in an effort to boost security and ensure more reliable

counts, across the country officials have been replacing them with voting machines

that produce a paper ballot. There has been noticeable progress on this front

according to a recent report from the nonprofit verified voting and the Brennan

Center for Justice in 2016 about 22% of registered voters were in jurisdictions that used DREs.

By 2020, that figure had fallen to 9% and could drop considerably more this year.

But Megan Meyer, co-author of the verified voting report,

says there's still work to be done

to replace what's left of these outdated machines.

We use age of equipment as one way of measuring equipment usage and changes through time.

Election equipment doesn't suddenly become too old after it's been in the field for 10 years versus nine years.

But what is most important is for local jurisdictions

to replace that equipment that's no longer being manufactured.

Yeah, and one of the things I found very interesting in your report was you actually

talked to people on the ground election officials that are, you know, they are the eyes and ears out in the world when it comes to this issue

one of them told you that he felt lucky to be able to get spare parts for

discontinued systems.

What did you make of that when you heard that?

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