“I do think the missing story that very few of you have written about is the absence of problems in the 2018 election," McConnell said recently. "I think the Trump administration did a much, much better job.” (Greenhalgh says that actually there were a lot of problems in 2018, in multiple states.) As a result, McConnell and his GOP are balking at spending more in the federal budget on election security aid. Nor is he likely to bring up several bills that specifically target the problem by mandating paper ballots and audits — which experts say is the only proven way to make sure that computerized systems don’t lose votes forever, whether from hackers or those dreaded glitches. They must be cracking open the vodka and doing a Cossack jig at the internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.