SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump has made it clear he is not a fan of voting machines, and now his administration is taking actions that are unnerving many election officials. Joining us now to talk about this is NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks. Hi, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: I'm confused here. I thought most of the country votes on paper ballots rather than machines. How common is this to begin with?
PARKS: That is correct. So more than 98% of Americans in 2024 voted on paper ballots.
DETROW: OK.
PARKS: But when we talk about voting machines, it can mean a few different things. In some cases, what people refer to when they say that are things called ballot marking devices. These are machines where people use a touch screen, and then it prints out a paper ballot that indicates their responses. They can make it so that it's less likely for human error, for instance, when someone writes a squiggle instead of coloring the little dot.
DETROW: Yeah.
PARKS: In other cases, voting machines are referring to how votes are tabulated. These are the scanners that election officials actually use to count the ballots. So voting machines can mean a few different things.
DETROW: Yeah. So Miles, the reason you're on today is that the Trump administration has been making moves lately related to this voting equipment, voting machines. Tell us about what's been going on.
PARKS: Yeah, so the most recent incident occurred last month in Missouri, where officials of the Justice Department reached out to local county clerks in Missouri and actually asked to inspect voting equipment they used in 2020. There are very strict rules about this, so the clerks politely declined these requests. But we saw similar requests from a consultant in Colorado saying they were working on behalf of the Trump administration, though the administration has distanced itself from those efforts. But election officials see those things and are pretty freaked out right now, especially considering that President Trump has also teased an executive order banning voting machines. It's very unclear what that actually would look like in practice, but it's clear he does not trust these machines at all.
DETROW: When it comes to the things that he is alleging, is there any truth to any of them?
PARKS: There isn't. And there have been - as we always talk about - so many instances where evidence could have come out since 2020, in the five years, right?
DETROW: Yeah.
PARKS: I mean, there have been court cases. For instance, Fox News paid a voting machine manufacturer almost $800 million to settle a defamation case after 2020. And then I always go back to Georgia, which is where a lot of the machine skepticism really centered...
DETROW: Right.
PARKS: ...In 2020 because voters do use those electronic marking devices for their paper ballots. But after the election in 2020 - people always forget this - the Republican secretary of state there oversaw an audit where they hand-counted every paper ballot, and it confirmed what the machine said.
DETROW: He did say that. I remember those press conferences where he and his top officials said this over and over and over. And yet, this idea - this false idea grew and still has hold over our politics years later. What do you think about the way that officials are saying, no, here's the clear-cut response. Is it just that people don't trust them? Like, what's going on here?
PARKS: It's a good question. I think it's very hard to cut through the noise in a very heated political moment. But I also will note that misinformation about voting machines is also really effective because the machines themselves are very complicated. I was talking about that with Jennifer Morrell, who's a former election official from Colorado in Utah.
JENNIFER MORRELL: You know, you've heard people say you can't trust the black box. I understand that, right? When you can't see it and you don't understand how it's used or vetted or verified, I can understand the skepticism.
DETROW: Does she, or just has anybody else you talked to, have a sense of, like, what needs to happen then to actually start to rebuild this trust?
PARKS: I think it's through extreme transparency. You know, no one should just have to trust that voting machines work. There have to be processes in place involving the paper ballots that people mark where you can go back and audit the results to make sure they work. And more and more states, Morrell told me, are implementing these sorts of rigorous audits.
DETROW: I guess, Miles, one last thing I'm wondering is President Trump - he's president of the United States. He won the 2024 election by a decisive margin, and yet he is still so focused on this 2020 election that he lost and saying he didn't lose. Any thought from you or from the world that you cover as to why this fixation remains?
PARKS: I mean, it's hard to psychoanalyze the president. I will also note, though, that the fixation did not just start with 2020, right? I mean, he won in 2016 and also spread false information about noncitizens voting in that election. So I'll say that he is clearly fixated on issues with the election system for a long time. But I think people who study voting and election officials I've talked to are really looking ahead on a lot of this stuff to how it could impact 2026 and 2028. And I think anyone who is seeding doubt about an election system, the kind of subtext of that is that the election system needs to change. So the fear is that this is basically a way for President Trump or allies of President Trump to change the system in ways that could advantage them.
DETROW: That's NPR voting correspondent, Miles Parks. Thanks so much.
PARKS: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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