Forty-six states have quietly adopted a free way for every voter to track their ballot this year, a potential rebuttal to fears that voting by mail is inherently risky.

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For most states, it's a simple online lookup that shows simple fields for each voter's ballot, like whether it's been sent or received, according to a tally from the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit that advocates allowing Americans to vote without having to visit a polling site.

Five states, plus several hundred counties, go further. They offer a service that marks every voter's envelope with a unique barcode like a shipped package and lets them receive updates via text message or email every step of the way.

That's a sharp increase from 2016, when only a handful of states allowed ballot tracking of any sort.

DULUTH, Minn. — For a campaign event featuring Donald Trump Jr., the brash-talking, liberal-dunking namesake of the president, it was all rather mundane.

There was no large rally with thronging crowds, but a few hundred seats at a community center, each socially distanced. The signature Trump campaign playlist, usually blared at a volume that makes conversation impossible, was replaced by a selection of library-level soft rock.

“I like the crowds a little bit more packed and a little tighter, but we have to play by different rules, and that’s OK,” he told supporters.

It was not supposed to be this way. If any state is positioned to go from blue to red in 2020, to embrace the fullness of Trumpology and provide the president some much-needed Electoral College insurance, it is Minnesota.

Can President Donald Trump do it again? Will he be able to convince enough undecided or uncommitted voters to give him another four years in office?

At the moment the short answer is “No”.

Looking just at the 2020 polls, an election observer could be forgiven for thinking that former Vice President Joe Biden has an easy path to unseating Trump. Yet few prognosticators are proclaiming an impending Biden victory. Perhaps this is because, despite a similar deficit in the summer of 2016, then-candidate Trump surprised everyone with an election night victory over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

A big part of that 2016 story is late-deciding voters decisively breaking towards Trump, potentially handing him victory and several swing states. One post-election analysis (APPOR 2016 Post-Election Report) found that Trump gained an average of 1% nationally and 3% in four swing states due to outperforming Clinton among the roughly one-in-eight voters making their decision in the week before Election Day.


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This year, undecided voters are more likely to be female, less likely to have a college degree, more likely to be younger, and are more likely to be a person of color.

... Democrats are much likelier than Republicans to say they will vote by mail — which makes sense given that Democrats also tend to be more supportive of mail voting. (By contrast, the Republican standard bearer, President Trump, has repeatedly and inaccurately assailed mail voting as ripe for fraud.)

According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 30 percent of registered voters said they planned to vote by mail, and 43 percent said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. But among Trump supporters, only 11 percent said they planned to vote by mail, and 66 percent said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. Among Joe Biden backers, 47 percent said they planned to vote by mail, while only 26 percent said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. (The share who said they would vote early in person was consistently 20-21 percent among all three groups: Trump supporters, Biden supporters and voters overall.)

If this holds, it would mean votes cast on Election Day would skew heavily toward Trump, and votes cast by mail would skew heavily toward Biden. This has serious implications for … well, democracy. First, Trump could argue the mail ballots (which, remember, could account for most of Biden’s votes) were fraudulent and thus should not be counted. Although it’s unlikely they’d actually be thrown out, this would damage the credibility of the election in the eyes of many Trump supporters. Second, it could mean the first votes counted on election night will be disproportionately good for Trump, who might claim victory based on incomplete returns. It might not be until days later, after a good chunk of the Democratic-leaning mail vote is counted, that Biden pulls ahead.