Long before there were concerns about foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, security experts warned that the electronic voting machines used in many states are insecure and open to tampering and that paper ballots were the most secure voting mechanism. Now, there is new proposed legislation in the Senate that would make paper ballots a requirement for all federal elections.

The introduction of the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act comes at a time when, nearly two years after the 2016 election, there is still considerable discussion about the extent of Russian influence on the outcome and what could have been done to prevent it. Since the early 2000s when electronic voting systems first went into wide use, experts have been publishing details of serious vulnerabilities in the software on the machines and warning that they shouldn’t be used. As early as 2004 a group of academic researchers published a paper that showed considerable flaws in a Diebold electronic voting machine.

“Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software,” the paper says.

More recently, J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan and an expert on voting system security, demonstrated in a video with _The New York Times_ that a voting machine in use in a number of states right now is subject to compromise, as well.

“Paper plus audits. All elections should be run this way,” Halderman said in the video.

The bill introduced June 12 in the Senate includes specific, detailed language specifying that all federal elections must use paper ballots that can be verified by the voter. The bill also requires that each voter be given the opportunity to correct any mistakes before a ballot is recorded.

“The voting system shall require the use of an individual, durable, voter-verified, paper ballot of the voter’s vote,” the bill says.