Paper caper: Red state voting ballots aren’t what Republicans expected

Listening to former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail, you’d think there were hardly any paper ballots used in American elections.

“We’ll straighten out our elections, too, so that we’re going to paper ballots,” Trump said at a December campaign rally at the University of New Hampshire, according to WMUR-TV 7.

ABC reported that Trump doubled down on that comment this year in appearance with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), demanding paper ballots — even though it’s up to every state and local jurisdiction to determine what voting system to use.

Neither the president nor Congress has the power to dictate how a particular American county or state chooses to vote. The Federal Election Commission and federal Election Assistance Commission are equally powerless.

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But the facts show that in 2020, most Americans voted in jurisdictions that indeed use paper ballots in one form or fashion.

In fact, all but one state that doesn’t use paper ballots or generates a reviewable paper trail voted for Trump in 2020. Many of these red states and locales, at the behest of Trump and other election deniers, are now struggling to switch to paper ballots. As they do, they’re finding that it’s not so easy, or cheap, to appease never-satisfied Republicans who seem to find a new voting conspiracy around every corner.

Fact checkers at ABC News and WMUR-TV noted that the majority of Americans overall cast votes on paper ballots. My own fact-checking, using data compiled by Verified Voting and posted on Governing.com, shows that in 2020, and again during 2022, almost 70 percent of Americans lived in states and voting jurisdictions with hand marked paper ballots.

This is almost the exact percentage as in the 2012 election, when Trump was still hosting his NBC reality television show, “The Apprentice.”

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Back in 2012, almost 25 percent of Americans lived under systems that had direct recording equipment without a “voter-verified paper audit trail” printers. As Ballotpedia notes, you’d have touchscreens, dials or some kind of mechanical buttons. Voter choices would be theoretically stored by the computer on a cartridge or hard drive. But you wouldn’t have any sort of separate paper record preserved for the purposes of an audit or hand recount.

According to Ballotpedia, direct recording equipment without a voter-verified paper audit trail cannot “produce paper records that can be preserved to be tabulated in case of an audit or recount.”

By 2022, these systems appeared in less than 10 percent of voting jurisdictions by 2022. And according to the Brennan Center for Justice, hardly any states will have such systems by the 2024 election, which makes Trump’s point relatively moot.

Most of the remaining states use ballot-marking devices, which “allows for the electronic presentation of a ballot, electronic selection of valid contest options, and the production of a human-readable paper ballot, but does not make any other lasting record of the voter’s selections,” according to Ballotpedia.

States or local voting jurisdictions with ballot-marking devices alone make up about 20 percent of voting jurisdictions.

Listening to Trump’s allies, you’d also think Dominion Voting Systems ran the 2020 election. But even with recent increases in usage, the company’s machines, the subject of many conspiracy theories, served barely a quarter of the voters.

So which states had jurisdictions without some kind of paper trail in 2020 — the direct recording equipment without voter-verified paper audit trail — that anger some Republicans?

According to Ballotpedia, those states with at least some voting jurisdiction with anti-paper voting machines in 2020 were Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma (only in some accessibility cases), Tennessee and Texas.

And Johnson’s home state of Louisiana was the only state in 2020 with direct recording equipment without voter-verified paper audit trail for all jurisdictions.

You read that correctly: One of the nation’s reddest states uses the least amount of paper ballots.

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None of these states were swing states in the last election. And all but one of these states without a voting machine paper trail voted for Trump in 2020.

After the 2020 election, when GOP outrage over the election results was at its zenith, Republicans in Louisiana passed a bill designed to overhaul the state’s current voting machines, now more than 30 years old, so outdated with some parts that aren’t even being manufactured any more.

But the bill was so cumbersome that the Louisiana legislature is trying to repeal portions of it, according to Wesley Muller of The Louisiana Illuminator, as recently reported by Raw Story.

Those red states with paperless systems in some jurisdictions are going to be stuck with quite a bill if they want to make Trump happy, should he get his wish in winning another term and “imposing” some sort of law on all voter jurisdictions.

When Georgia was deciding on paying for hand-marked paper ballot systems or “touchscreen-marked paper ballots,” the version with paper ballots was estimated to be $224 million — almost $75 million more than electronic system with paper verification, which had “superior security, accessibility and transparency” claimed then-Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, according to Georgia’s Secretary of State office.

Instead of listening to election deniers complain about paper ballots, it seems that modernizing election systems might be a better choice for states heading into future elections.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.