Donald Trump on elections: what the evidence says · JRE #2219

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Trump has repeated this specific claim on multiple occasions, including in an August 2025 White House statement using nearly identical language ('approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots'), and FactCheck.org examined that near-identical repetition directly. Matthew Weil, vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told FactCheck.org the claim does not hold up: most American jurisdictions already vote on hand-marked paper ballots counted by machines that function as 'glorified scanners,' so there is no large class of all-electronic systems left to replace, and switching to watermarked paper would raise costs rather than lower them, since that paper stock is more expensive than standard ballot paper. A companion PolitiFact fact-check of the same White House remarks addressed a related claim from the same statement, that machines delay results while paper ballots would be counted the same night, and rated it False, citing election officials and researchers who said eliminating machines in favor of full hand-counting would be slower, more error-prone, and more expensive at scale, not cheaper. Neither fact-check identifies any source substantiating a precise 10x cost gap or an 8% figure for paper ballots as a share of machine costs. The claim is rated unsupported: no itemized cost data backs the specific ratio, and the most similar, directly fact-checked public repetition of this claim was found not accurate by outside experts, who described the cost dynamic as running the opposite direction from what Trump describes.