US Election Night: How Machines Changed the Way Americans Vote

Key Takeaways

• Different states and counties deploy various technologies to collect and count votes.
• Around 5% of registered voters live in a jurisdiction that uses electronic voting machines.
• Voting machine companies have been scrutinized in the wake of the 2020 election.

For the 2024 U.S. elections, votes will be cast and counted using various ballot markers, tabulation machines, and electronic voting systems.

After the 2020 election, when Donald Trump made voting machines a central component of his election theft narrative, voting technology and processes are under intense scrutiny.

The Rise of Electronic Voting

Since punch card-based systems were phased out following the controversies of the Bush-Gore election in 2000, various methods of digital vote casting and counting have become predominant.

With the exception of a few mostly rural locations where ballots are counted by hand, the vast majority of vote counting occurs electronically. However, different processes are in place in each state.

According to Verified Voting , in 2024, 95% of voters live in a jurisdiction that uses a combination of paper ballots and optical scan systems to tally results.

While hand-marked ballots remain the most popular, 25.1% of jurisdictions deploy electronic ballot marking (EBM) devices. 

The remaining 5% of voters use electronic voting systems that don’t rely on ballots at all. These typically let people vote by selecting their preferred candidates on a touch screen.

​​Thirty-one states, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands allow certain voters—typically military or overseas voters or those with disabilities to return ballots electronically, via fax, email, or through an online portal.​ 

Trump’s Election Fraud Allegations

In the four years since he initially claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, Trump has taken aim at a string of technologies used in the modern American democratic process.

Immediately after the election, Trump said  that Dominion Voting Systems “deleted” 2.7 million Republican votes across the country. 

Meanwhile, pro-Trump media outlets pushed unproven allegations that Dominion Voting Systems  and Smartmatic were responsible for widespread election fraud that tilted the vote in Joe Biden’s favor.

Voting Machine Manufacturers 

Since 2020, both Dominion and Smartmatic have won considerable payouts from settlements with news outlets that peddled the false claims. 

And this time, ahead of Tuesday’s election, both firms have gone on the offensive. 

Smartmatic has a new page  on its website dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, Dominion commissioned  the independent National Election Security Lab to assess the claims made about its technology.

The analysis found that the kind of interference Dominion’s critics say occurred in 2020 would be “operationally infeasible.”

Future Election Tech

Although debates about election integrity have become increasingly partisan in the Trump era, in theory, all sides promote the transparent use of secure technology to minimize fraud and manipulation. 

A rising backlash against electronic voting systems has led to new hybrid approaches that print backup paper ballots as a precaution against potential fraud claims. 

For now, the immutable materiality of ink on paper remains an important assurance for many voters, especially among Trump voters, at a time when trust in the process has dwindled. 

In recent years, some countries have experimented with online voting. However, most have concluded that the process is too insecure for widespread adoption. 

Some researchers have proposed using decentralized, blockchain-based voting systems to overcome security challenges. Although they might be more convenient than in-person voting and less vulnerable to hacking than other digital systems, they would be open to identity fraud without a comprehensive digital ID and verification scheme.