ES&S, the top producer of voting machines used in the United States, has said that it will stop selling outdated paperless voting machines that are known to be vulnerable to cyberattacks. In March, four senior Democratic lawmakers had asked the company for an explanation of its continued sale of vulnerable, paperless machines. The ES&S’s policy reversal appears to be a reaction to this inquiry.
Cybersecurity experts have long denounced the practice of using paperless voting machines because these make it impossible to verify whether or not machines may have been tampered with. This risk is significantly reduced if machines instead rely on physical paper records of votes that can be checked.
Read more: Top voting machine maker reverses position on election security, promises paper ballots
