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You can also send it to your local election officers, and news stations.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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That's why the current gold standard is a machine that marks a human-readable paper ballot, and then a drop box, and then a separate machine that reads and counts the ballots. At all times, the physical manifestation of people's votes sit in a guarded box, as piles of physical ballots that can be read and counted by humans, if necessary.
The initial ballot marking machine is good to have because it can prevent overvotes (marking more options than allowed, invalidating the ballot) and can make sure that voters intend their under votes (marking fewer options than the maximum allowed, such as when someone intentionally chooses not to vote on a particular item). The 2000 election taught America what can go wrong with ballots physically marked by the voter, even through a punch card machine. Even since then, there's been issues with what to do with stray marks or incomplete markings on optical scanned ballots (akin to Scantron tests when I was in school).
And once the ballots are marked, it's convenient to have reliable machines count the votes on the ballot. That way vote reporting is quick.
But the paper trail itself is the most important. It has to be a human readable ballot that the voter can visually verify before dropping it into the ballot box.
This is more or less how it works in my state. The voting machines are electronic but before you cast your ballot it physically prints it onto a paper ballot which it displays to you in a window, so you can verify that ballot says the same thing as what you put on the screen. The electronically recorded vote goes who=knows-where, if it goes anywhere at all, but the printed paper ballot goes into a strongbox underneath the machine.
Fun fact: my state got Dominion machines like this in 2019 and then immediately elected Democratic Senators for the first time since 2002, when it had switched from punch-card machines to Diebold paperless ones.
In 2024, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law to get rid of the current machines (which was supposed to have been in effect by now, but has been delayed because it didn't provide funding say what to replace them with).
I'm sure that's all just a series of coincidences.