But with carefully preserved paper ballots in use throughout the U.S., and with the whole world watching, recounts reliably done in key swing states like Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania have protected this election, undercutting Trump's attempts to steal it.
In recent years, scanning devices have been installed to read inserted ballots, producing digital images that can be tallied almost instantly. When the machines' coding is open to public scrutiny, and when the digital images are preserved along with the ballots, the system can be remarkably fast, reliable and secure.
Since the 1980s, Oregon, Washington State, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii have been voting almost entirely by mail, with great success. This year's pandemic made voting in person risky. With enthusiastic support from election protection activists, California, Nevada, Vermont, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., also mailed ballots to all eligible voters. Many other states required an application to be filled out. All saw huge increases in hand-marked paper ballots that were mailed in, walked in or put in drop boxes.
But this year was also characterized by blatant acts of voter suppression on a very large scale.
The demand came straight from the top, as Trump complained that if voting rights are expanded, "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."
Indeed, fearing a diverse tsunami of young voters, many of them subsequently mobilized by the mass anti-racism marches sparked by the murder of George Floyd Trump understood all too well his party's motives for strictly limiting the number of people who actually receive ballots.
Thus, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission, more than 17 million citizens nationwide were stripped from the registration rolls between the 2016 and 2018 elections. Many in-person voting centers required citizens to vote on hackable touchscreens, or to use unreliable marking devices, or to accept provisional ballots whose fates were often unknown.
Through his appointed crony, Louis DeJoy, Trump also assaulted the U.S. Postal Service in a blatant attempt to sabotage vote-by-mail. Reports were widespread of ballots sent out late, to wrong addresses or not at all. Thousands were found in mail centers undelivered on and after Election Day. Estimates of the percentage of mailed-out ballots that never made it back to voting centers generally range up to 6 percent, numbers far beyond many electoral margins.
There were plenty of other problems. But the bottom line remains that tens of millions of paper ballots still reside in the archives. Where their scanned images are preserved, most are easily trackable. Recounts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona have withstood critical Trump assaults.
In the bigger picture, in the face of Trump's massive attack on voter registrations, a concerted, well-informed movement to restore the right to vote to millions of disenfranchised citizens became a major factor in the 2020 vote. Grassroots efforts to get newly registered and re-registered citizens to actually cast their ballot also had an impact.
In fact, those efforts may have been decisive, especially among young millennial Generation Z citizens who voted in record numbers. More than 60 percent of them voted against Trump, possibly providing Biden with his margin of victory.
Yet, also decisive has been the 20-year campaign for hand-marked paper ballots. The 2020 pandemic was a prime mover in getting these ballots mailed out. But movement pressure had already helped vastly expand their overall use.
With their scanned electronic images, paper ballots have provided 2020's vital bulwark against an anti-electoral coup. Without them, we would be buried in electronic chaos an intractable mess the perfect swamp for a would-be tyrant.
With protected voter registration rolls, safe places to vote, and long windows to do so, and with hand-marked, digitally scanned paper ballots, we have a proven, workable road map toward a real democracy a safe, transparent, reliable way to cast, count and verify our votes.
Getting there on a permanent basis will take every ounce of our commitment. But the potential payback is beyond measure.
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