Enough States Have a Paper Trail For Biden to Win

One of the reasons postulated for Trump’s campaign against mail-in ballots (except his own) is that he thinks Russia can hack the results if ballots are electronic only and therefore hackable by his master Putin. If that’s really his reasoning, that’s not likely to go well. I did some research based on this webpage — Voting System Paper Trail Requirements — of the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of June 2019 (the latest list I could find) of which states have a paper trail that is useful for auditing. It’s more complicated than I’d thought it would be. Texas, for example, has no statewide requirement but allows counties to require paper, some states have no statutory requirement but have universal paper ballots anyway, some states have statutes but haven’t fully implemented them yet. New Jersey just switched to all mail ballots, but that may be challenged, so I didn’t include it, either.

So I limited my selection to those states that, as a practical matter, have statewide or nearly statewide voting procedures that provide a paper trail that can be used for an audit, as of June 2019. By that criterion, I found:

40 states with 412 electoral votes

Of those, 23 states, with 272 electoral votes, are solid or leaning toward Joe Biden.

Note: States that  do not have a paper trail as of June2019 are marked “tossup.”

Now, this says nothing at all about voter suppression efforts, particularly the utterly insane, completely unprincipled, totally corrupt plot to destroy the USPS just to keep people from voting for Biden. But at least it says that if we do get our votes in, they are going to be counted.