; sense of Congress (a) Short title This Act may be cited as the Securing America’s Elections Act of 2018 . (b) Sense of Congress It is the sense of Congress that according to the Department of Homeland Security there were attempts to hack the election infrastructure of 21 States during the 2016 elections. The failing security and vulnerabilities in our national election infrastructure were later confirmed and highlighted by the hacking community in a report issued in September 2017, after the DEFCON 25 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. In light of these findings, the Government must act with all deliberate purpose to ensure that the integrity of elections in the United States is protected against hackers. 2. Promoting accuracy, integrity, and security through voter-verified permanent paper ballot (a) Ballot verification and audit capacity (1) In general Section 301(a)(2) of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 ( 52 U.S.C. 21081(a)(2) ) is amended to read as follows: (2) Ballot verification and audit capacity (A) Voter-verified paper ballots (i) Verification (I) The voting system shall require the production of a voter-verified paper ballot of the voter’s vote that shall be created by or made available for inspection and verification by the individual voter before the voter’s vote is cast and counted. For purposes of this subclause, a voter-verified paper ballot includes (but is not limited to) a paper ballot marked by the voter for the purpose of being counted by hand or read by an optical scanner or other similar device, a paper ballot prepared by the voter to be mailed to an election official (whether from a domestic or overseas location), a paper ballot created through the use of a ballot marking device or system, or a paper ballot produced by a touch screen or other electronic voting machine, so long as in each case the voter is permitted to verify the ballot in a paper form in accordance with this subparagraph. (II) The voting system shall provide the voter with an opportunity to correct any error made by the