Swing state Pennsylvania is taking a strong administrative stand against voting machines without a paper trail. According to a Ballot Access News post by Richard Winger, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State Robert Torres “instructed all the counties to eliminate all vote-counting machines that don’t create a paper audit trail, before the 2020 election”. A recent story by New York-based BuzzFeed News cybersecurity correspondent Kevin Collier broke the news:

About 83% of Pennsylvanians live in districts where voting machines produced no paper record in 2016, according to Verified Voting, a nonprofit that tracks voting equipment in the US. In March, after losing a special election to represent Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District by only a few hundred votes, Republican Rick Saccone chose not to pursue a recount: With no way to audit the vote count, that district’s counties couldn’t have produced a different result.

That article also had the following on the national backstory on the use of vote counting machines with no paper trail:

Experts say the most important safeguard that isn’t nationally implemented is to make sure that voting machines produce an independent paper trail, so that a post-election audit can verify results. Thirteen states, including Pennsylvania, currently use voting machines with no paper trail. Five of those — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, and South Carolina — use them exclusively.