The smart cards used by various systems to begin and (in some cases) record an e-voting session. The cards are widely regarded as a potential security hole, easy to lose, damage or possibly forge.

VVPAT (or VVPT)

Voter-verifiable paper audit trail; a feature of some DRE machines that allows them to print a record of the voter's choices that can be visually scanned for accuracy. VVPAT capability is held by most e-voting watchdog to be a security improvement over paperless DRE machines, but most observers note that a paper trail is fairly useless unless rules exist for auditing the results.