1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2018 . 2. Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) Access to the ballot, free and fair elections, and a trustworthy election process are at the core of American Democracy. Just as the Founding Fathers signed their names to paper supporting their views for a government by and for the people, access to the paper ballot is the best way to ensure elections stay by and for the American people. Using paper provides an easily auditable, tamper proof, and simple way for citizens to access their ballot. It is for these reasons and more that using paper ballots to ensure resilient and fair elections should be the priority of this Nation. (2) Risk-limiting audits will help to protect our elections from cyberattacks, by ensuring that if the electoral outcome is incorrect, for instance because someone tampered with the electronic counts or reporting, the audit has a large, known probability of correcting the outcome by requiring a full hand count. Paper ballots are vital to the audit process since, other than through manual inspection of a sample of paper ballots, there is currently no reliable way to determine whether an election was hacked or the outcome was miscalculated. (3) Risk-limiting audits are a cost effective way of auditing election results. They generally require inspecting only a small percentage of the ballots cast in an election, and proceed to a full hand count only when sampling does not provide strong evidence that the reported outcome is correct. This will ensure that Americans have confidence in their election results, without the cost of a full recount of every ballot in the country. 3. Paper ballot and manual counting requirements (a) 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) Paper ballot requirement (A) Voter-verified paper ballots (i) Paper ballot requirement (I) The voting system shall require the use of an