Election Registration: The Status of the U.S. Senate, the State of Wisconsin, and the Key Problems of the Midterm Elections

Republicans need a net gain of just five seats to take back the House. They’re in the driver’s seat and widely expected to reach that and then some. But the full extent of a GOP wave, if there is one, or whether Democrats pull off the surprise and hold the House, won’t be known for a while.

In terms of predicting outcomes, it’s hard to say. In the Trump era, high turnout is not necessarily the advantage that it used to be for Democrats, and we don’t know how much of the early-voter surge represents newly motivated voters or are merely voters who would have cast their ballots anyway through some other means. It is impossible to know what the results of the Governor and Senate races will be because there are so many wild-card factors playing this year.

Three states in particular — Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania — that are seen as the likeliest to change party hands have emerged as the epicenter of the Senate fight with an increasing volume of acrimony and advertising. In many ways, the two parties have been talking almost entirely past each other both on the campaign trail and on the airwaves — disagreeing less over particular policies than debating entirely different lists of challenges and threats facing the nation.

The November elections are the third or fourth thing that I’m keeping an eye on. Forrest K. Lehman is the director of elections and registration in the county. “It should be number one.”

Perhaps the most pressing problem nationwide is a barrage of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of absentee ballot envelopes and applications.

Sue Ertmer, the county clerk in the state of Wis., said she received 120 requests for records in a couple of weeks. She said it’s difficult to get a lot of other things done when you get those types of requests. It is a little overwhelming.

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. Election deniers offered instructions on filing records requests at a seminar hosted by Mr. Lindell in Springfield, Mo., in August.

Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was important to the job of election workers. He claimed that he had received digital recreations of the cast vote records of every voter from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. The records show that the theory that balloting was manipulated nationwide is plausible, according to Mr. Lindell.

What does voter fraud tell us about Georgia, and why does it matter? An editor’s note: What do we really need to know about voter fraud?

There is an editor’s note. Jay Bookman is an award winning political columnist from Georgia who works for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He now writes regularly for the Georgia Recorder. You can follow him on social media. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

Voters continue to turn out in record numbers here in Georgia, with early voting totals approaching those of a presidential election year. In a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season like this one, the question is natural: What does it mean?

That uncertainty is a nightmare for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote is very easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. In a tumultuous year like this one, with so many variables, that’s a caution to the rest of us about putting too much credence in pollsters’ work product.

Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill into law, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who advocated for it, had already conceded that voter fraud played no role in recent election outcomes. In Raffensperger’s words, “we had safe, secure, honest elections,” a conclusion shared by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, federal officials in former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, and state and federal judges. Is fraud the real reason for those changes?

That’s what happens when you sell people on a false narrative, then rewrite state law to encourage taking action on that false narrative. Confidence in voting surely has been if voting isn’t being suppressed so far.

Democrats have built a well-funded voter protection apparatus that helps people overcome bureaucratic hurdles to vote.

The last point is crucial. The Republicans said the changes to the law in order to fight voter fraud were necessary to their base. That reason makes no sense.

There is no reason to believe there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state count. But Masters’ comment, like Karamo’s lawsuit, achieves the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day tales in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

And it’s the consequences of that bad-faith narrative that ought to worry us. As we witnessed in 2020, Trump took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that the GOP had nurtured over decades and he repurposed it to an even more nefarious goal, transforming it from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcomes as illegitimate altogether.

Trump tells his supporters in rallies that he doesn’t think we’ll have a fair election again. I don’t believe it.”

In SB 202, for example, Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law regarding how a voter, or elector, can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. There is no need to limit the number of people whose qualifications may be challenged, according to the new statement. The law requires local election boards to hear challenges within 10 business days.

Around the state, conservatives are attempting to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on extremely flimsy grounds and are growing frustrated that those challenges keep failing.

“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. Get your county in order or get your things in order.

Trump Ignored the Midterm Election: Counting Votes in the Critical State of Pennsylvania, Not in Cruz’s State of Texas

Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. “Here we go again!” he wrote. “Rigged Election!”

Trump’s supposed evidence? There was an article on a right-wing news site that showed no rigging. The article raised suspicion about the data it didn’t explain.

In 2020, Former President Donald Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims the election was stolen. Republicans have been using similar rhetoric in the weeks leading up to the election.

Trump is not the only Republican trying to baselessly promote suspicion about the midterms in Pennsylvania, a state that could determine which party controls the US Senate.

Republican candidate for governor Doug Mastriano told a right-wing audience that the vote count in Pennsylvania could take days after the acting elections chief said last week that it could take days.

The state offered grants to the counties that would keep counting votes after the polls close, instead of going home in the middle of the night. All but four of the commonwealth’s 67 counties took advantage of this deal. The new policy should speed up the count.

Counties of all kinds across the country – including, as PolitiFact noted, some Republican counties in Cruz’s state of Texas – do not complete their vote counts on the night of the election. In fact, it is impossible for many counties to have final counts on election night.

Even aside from the fact that the big cities that tend to lean Democratic have many more votes to count than the small rural counties that tend to lean Republican, Cruz’s claim is plain false.

American elections authorities do not declare winners or official vote totals on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.

The Health Challenges of John Fetterman and the Democratic Candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate Race: Why People Can’t Let It Happen That Way

The health challenges of the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, have also been used to cast preemptive doubt on the possible outcome.

Biden was a poor candidate in the election and some right-wing individuals said that it must have been stolen. Tucker Carlson, the prime-time host on Fox, argued last week that people shouldn’t accept a win by Fetterman because of his difficulties with public speaking.

Fetterman won in a state that Biden won by more than 80,000 votes. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

A Republican candidate for secretary of state wants a court to throw out many Absentee ballots in Detroit because they were thrown out because they weren’t returned in person.

The homemaker from Phoenix attended the Lake rally and said she used to vote mail-in. After the 2020 election, Ms. Black did not think Ms. Hobbs could oversee the process. “I want to vote ‘day of,’” she said, “so it’s counted right there. I don’t want to take any risks.

The Karamo-Jackiw-Palmer lawsuit and the democrats’ grip on the 2020 election: Do the candidates really care about the outcome?

Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.

There is a chance that Democrats might potentially cheat on Election Day or during the count of the votes, said other Republican candidates.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do the Democrats have anything new to offer?

The Daily Beast reported that Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. He told a similar story at an event in June.

How bad do things have to be? In an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, 43 percent of voters said they worried about threats of violence or intimidation while voting. New York Times/Siena College polling has found that insofar as people worry about threats to democracy in the United States, they attribute the problem to the opposing party — an untenable situation that is tough to resolve. Recently, people have shown up, armed, to watch voter drop boxes. Many, many Republican candidates continue to advance false claims about the 2020 election. In the past few years, election officials and workers have quit due to threats and demands. One violent episode can change people’s lives for the better, as well as changing politics in unexpected ways. In such a situation, voting and election work moves into a permanent siege posture.

And election officials say they feel increasingly on edge, ready not just for the frenzy of Election Day but the chaos of misinformation and disputes that may follow.

Counting Absentee Votes in Maricopa, Arizona, and Nevada: The Case of a Democrat-backed U.S. Supreme Court Decision

“I’ve felt like I’ve been stabbed in the back repeatedly so much that I don’t have anything but scar tissue,” said Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., home to Phoenix.

Like some other election offices, the Maricopa election office has beefed up its security in preparation for Tuesday. A metal perimeter fence has been added to the building after right-wing protests in 2020. The email made allusion to the French Revolution and promised to find the election officials’ personal addresses. It was referred to the F.B.I. by the Arizona secretary of state.

Though the early voting has been largely uneventful, many experts and officials are braced for disruptions after polls have closed, when activists and lawyers are prepared to challenge ballots and dispute counting procedures, and losing candidates who have cast doubt on the integrity of the process may file lawsuits.

The most prominent case is a GOP-backed lawsuit in Pennsylvania, where Republicans targeted absentee ballots with missing or improper dates on the container envelopes. The Supreme Court said last week that the votes should be kept out of the count, but they could not agree on the validity of the ballots. Thousands of voters whose mail ballots were at risk of being rejected because they were missing or incorrect dates were posted to their websites by local election officials over the weekend.

The conservative activists said that they are requesting a court to separate military votes from the election count, after a Milwaukee election official successfully requested military votes with false names and sent them to a lawmaker. Lawyers who worked on a campaign to change the election are going to bring a lawsuit because they promote conspiracy theories about the loss.

But a significant portion of the pre-election litigation – about 1 in 5 of the cases that seek new restrictions – have been brought by state GOP committees or the Republican National Committee, according to Democracy Docket. The RNC has sought to build out its operations around monitoring elections after being sidelined from that work with a court consent decree that expired in 2018.

Democrats and outside groups have contributed to the litigation, pushing for ease in counting Absentee ballots, and challenging Republican officials’ plans to hand-count ballots.

In neighboring Nevada – another state where Republicans hope to flip a Senate seat and control of the governors’ office – GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s office recently halted hand counting in rural Nye County. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada took the state Supreme Court to task for its decision that volunteering to read aloud the votes of a candidate who got the most votes violates state law.

As the votes come in and begin to be process and counted on Tuesday, election officials are on guard for conspiracy theories that often spread like wildfire but are flatly untrue.

In Mesa, the Phoenix suburb, volunteers in tactical gear held a protest outside of a ballot drop box the day after the 2020 election to stop the Steal.

Last week a judge issued a restraining order against the right-wing group, Clean Elections USA, that organized the drop box operation in Mesa, banning its members from openly carrying weapons within 250 feet of the drop box and from videotaping, following or photographing voters within 75 feet.

In her position as Arizona’s Secretary of state, she has directed 18 referrals of voter intimidation to law enforcement. Voters in the complaints described being photographed with long-lens cameras, having their license plates recorded, and being watched. The case was brought after the judge’s order had been filed.

Republican candidates and party officials have also encouraged their voters to cast ballots in person on Election Day, reflecting two years of legal arguments and talk claiming that Democrats used expanded access to absentee voting in 2020 to illegitimately win the election. At a campaign rally in Arizona on Thursday evening, candidates called on the crowd to vote in person, and they received a loud round of applause.

In some states, Republicans jumped out to an early lead in 2020, only to get swamped as Democratic-leaning mail ballots were counted, a phenomenon dubbed the “blue shift” or “red mirage.” But in other states, Republicans gained as the vote-count filled in over several days, buoyed by redder batches of votes.

Even though Mr. Trump was popular, election denial has spread even further. In Northern California’s mostly rural Shasta County, where he carried two-thirds of the vote in 2020, tensions over elections and other issues have been rising for months. Local activists demanded a halt to early voting, push to count ballots by hand and force voter ID at the polls, which are not legal in the state.

Election Day Insecurity: How Many Georgia Voters Are Enough? A Mother-of-The-Path Analysis of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office

In the face of public protest, the county’s chief executive resigned, its health officer quit and the health board publicly denounced the state’s vaccine mandates.

Cathy Darling Allen, the Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said she has familiar Election Day worries: A forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent some of the 180,000 voters in her mountainous county from getting to the polls.

In Georgia, a state with a long history of intimidation and tension at the polls, some community leaders expressed similar unease, amid rising threats of political violence.

“I will admit I’m apprehensive about Election Day because you never know what some people will do,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia. “And I look at Arizona, people dressed in these outfits, it can be intimidating.”

More than 65,000 voters in Georgia have had their registrations challenged by fellow citizens, under procedures laid out in a new voting law. Eventhough most of the challenges have been thrown out, there are still some Georgia voters who are unsure about being on the rolls. A homeless woman in Georgia was forced to vote on a special ballot because her registration had been removed during a Republican challenge. The problem was reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But Bishop Jackson was also buoyed by surging turnout in the state, and pointed to efforts of his church and many other voting rights organizations to ensure voters were prepared for the midterms.

There are many things to consider when casting your ballot on Election Day, such as the use of mail voting, the prospect of razor-thin races, and early voting.

Many of the elections could go on for days, if not weeks. It is normal when there are close elections. It does not mean that there is fraud despite the lies about the 2020 loss that former President Trump has pushed and many candidates he has endorsed.

If that happens, the election would go to a Dec. 6 runoff, which means control of the Senate quite possibly won’t be known for a month after Election Day.

“Election workers must be given a reasonable amount of time to do their jobs thoroughly. Unofficial results will be available within a few days of the election, and it’s critically important for everyone to understand that this delay does not mean anything nefarious is happening. An accurate count of all eligible votes is paramount, and it cannot be rushed,” Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, Leigh Chapman, said Monday in a statement.

Election officials can’t process mail ballots until polls open on Election Day. If they take a longer time to report, then you could see another Red Mirage.

Arizona saw a slow trickle in Trump’s favor in 2020 as the hours went on. Some years have seen the opposite. It’s likely that there will be one shift this year. Biden’s lead narrowed as the vote counting continued and the 2020 presidential election was called at 3 a.m. The state was determined by a small margin, and Arizona has switched to automatic recounts for contests that are less than half a percentage point apart. Arizona has been ground zero for election denialism with counts and recounts and an attempt at putting a fake slate of electors up in favor of Trump. There are challenges around the legitimacy of the vote that could cause more chaos.

The shift might be less sharp this time. The share of Georgians voting by mail in 2020 is likely to be smaller in the years to come. The experience of election officials with tabulating mail-in votes has led to a faster count. These and other factors will likely blunt the impact of the “blue shift.”

Nevada is a similar story to Georgia. It’s a growth state, and most of that boom has been in Las Vegas, which is in Clark County, the largest population center in the state and where almost 70% of all the state’s votes came from in 2020. Clark and Washoe (Reno), which went for Biden in 2020, count more slowly than the more rural counties that will overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Also, post-pandemic, Nevada is one state that has moved toward mail voting. The option to vote in person still exists, but residents have to opt out of receiving the ballot if they so choose.

The Implications of a Red Shift in Election Processes: Biden vs. McSally, Kemp, and the Runoff State of Georgia

The time before the winner is determined can be shortened by legal challenges and recounts. It will take patience in this impatient time so expect this to keep going for a while.

These quirks of the US election system are not new, but they are usually predictable. And they aren’t indicative of fraud or wrongdoing, despite what many prominent Republicans have falsely claimed.

There was a clear red shift in Arizona in 2020. Former President Donald Trump gained ground as more batches of votes were tallied after Election Night, but Trump never overtook Biden, who carried the state by roughly 10,000 ballots, or just about 0.3% of the vote.

The Grand Canyon State has a long and bipartisan history of mail-in voting. But that trend started changing in 2020, with some Republicans eschewing the method because of Trump’s false claims of fraud. The early results look blue because mail in voting is more popular among Democrats.

These shifts can be very unpredictable. In 2018, the later waves of results helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema beat incumbent GOP Sen. Martha McSally. The race was called six days after Election Day.

This was dramatic in 2020. Trump was ahead by nearly 700,000 votes on Election Night, but over four painstaking days, his lead evaporated as mail-in votes were tallied in the major population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Biden won the election in the state by about 63,000 votes and was expected to win the White House on the Saturday after the election.

Biden and his two nominees for Senate were in close races. (Biden’s victory came in November, while the Senate candidates won runoffs in January 2021.) They all padded their numbers as more ballots were counted over time, overcoming the “red mirage” from the early results.

There are close races this year for governor and senate, featuring incumbent Brian Kemp in a re-enactment of his first race against Democratic nominee, Georgia’s lieutenant governor.

As the results start pouring in on Tuesday night, remember that Georgia is a runoff state. The top two vote getters will face each other in the second round next month if no candidate passes 50%.

Election officials in the state have not released many details about the vote-counting process, like which types of ballots will be reported first, and which will be reported later. This information is essential to figuring out the possible complexion of the early vote, compared with the later-reporting figures.

Furthermore, this is the first midterm election in Nevada with universal mail-in voting. The system was adopted by the state when the Covid-19 flu hit in 2020.

Another variable are the ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive at election offices after the polls close. There are some people that call these late-arriving ballots. In Nevada, they can still get counted as long as they arrive by November 12.

The 2020 GOP Presidential Elections: Where Will They Go? Where Do We Stand? Where Will We Go? What Will They Be? Where Are The Undated Mail-in Voting Spots?

Within 24 hours, it became apparent that Biden would be the winner in 2020. Of the five states Biden flipped in 2020, Wisconsin was the “first,” in the sense that it was the first Trump-to-Biden flip that the news networks were able to project..

Still, with close to 2 million mail-in ballots requested in Michigan as of last week — and more than 1.4 million in Pennsylvania — election officials in these closely watched states will have plenty of work left to do after the ballots are processed and ready for counting.

“What we saw in 2020 was this effort to undermine the elections, but, for the most part, it happened after the elections,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the organization Common Cause, which advocates on democracy issues. The prep is what we are seeing.

Some cases have been brought by fringe legal groups that are in favor of Donald Trump.

There is a chance the balance of power in Washington will be determined by the court battles over the mid-terms. It is possible that the ground rules for the presidential election of 2024 will be set, as they try to decide if Trump will be on the ballot again after lying about his innocence in the 2020 election.

“My concern is that the number of those undated mail ballots could exceed the margins in some of those races, which could create real problems,” said David Becker, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. It’s better to resolve those disputes before you know the results. A political axe to grind could be created once the margins are clear.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement after the state Supreme Court ruling that it was a “massive victory for Pennsylvania voters and the rule of law” and a “milestone in Republicans’ ongoing efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania and nationwide.”

The lawsuit that the Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed was related to the North Carolina Republican Party’s failure to block the use of signature matching for Absentee ballots.

The Republican National Committee is engaged in a major effort to recruit poll workers. And national and state GOP parties have gone to court to demand proof they are being hired. Some of the fights have focused on the rules for poll workers and what records Republicans can get about them, while others focused on the policies for poll watchers.

A judge in Virginia ordered Prince William County officials to appoint more Republicans to top election spots after the state GOP filed a legal action.

And in Michigan, Republicans say they’re appealing the dismissal of a case they brought against election officials in Flint, Michigan, alleging that the officials had not hired enough GOP poll workers for the election.

“Flint has over 80% Democrat inspectors, and over 90% Democrat inspectors for the Absentee Vote Counting Boards,” said Michigan GOP spokesperson Gustavo Portela, who called the ratio “unacceptable.” He pointed to a state law requiring that the party breakdowns for those workers to be as close to equal as possible.

“We have bent over backwards, and we were extremely responsive,” Gates said. “And for some reason, there’s certain people out there – and I hate to admit it but Arizona Republican Party [Chair] Kelli Ward is one of them — who’s more interested in creating concern, distractions and disruptions in this election process.”

“We are filing, and mostly winning, these lawsuits because counties in various states are violating the law, plain and simple,” the RNC said in a statement to CNN. “Every decisive victory is a win for transparency at the ballot box.”

Albert said that there are attempts to toss out the ballots from election sites in dispute if the demands for more Republican workers are not met.

She thinks that Republicans will say that if the election isn’t perfect, then all of the ballots don’t count. An election has never run perfect in the history of the world.”

Western battleground states have become the sites of disputes over the technology that is used for voting, where outlandish theories about fraud in the 2020 election have manifested in pushes to conduct aspects of the midterm elections by hand.

There are three competitive races on the ballot, as well as a state elections chief, in Cochise County which has over 80,000 registered voters.

David Stevens, one of the hand count’s proponents, did not reply to a CNN request for comment. The Arizona Republic reported that during a court hearing Friday, Stevens said that the county could proceed with the count and that 40,000 ballots would be involved.

Nye County spokesman Arnold Knightly said officials there still hope to revive the hand counting if the secretary of state signs off a new plan in which volunteers tally the results in silence. Like Cochise, Nye still plans to use electronic tallying machines in this election.

Critics say that, if these parallel counts are allowed to proceed, they could set the stage for dueling results, which would further upset voters and the officials who will certify the general election results.

DURHAM, N.C. One of the challenges of being alive right now is making sense of the threat to the American election system: It’s hard to determine, conclusively, how widespread that threat is, how much chaos and danger we’re living through and what to do next.

Nobody likes to think that we’re capable of living like that. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.

Fighting Fetterman Against a First Amendment Amendment: The Lack of a Confidentiality Envelope as a Barrier to the Voting Rights of Pennsylvanians

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s campaign has gone to a federal court to try to have Pennsylvania voters’ mail-in ballots counted if they weren’t signed with a valid date.

The date on the mail ballot envelope has nothing to with a voter’s qualifications and is only meant to erect barriers to qualified voters exercising their right to vote. This unnecessary impediment violates the Civil Rights Act and the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” they wrote.

Pennsylvanians should check their ballot status to make sure their vote is counted as we fight the Republican attack on democratic rights. The groups will be using all their power to protect Pennsylvanians from the GOP and defeat them in court.

Those who sent in their ballots without a confidentiality envelope will still be able to vote. Once they are notified their vote may be canceled, they will be given the chance to correct their ballots by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Zulick noted that the Republicans who brought the case said at a hearing that they had no issue with voters correcting defective ballots if they were handing a ballot over in person, “across the counter.”

More than 41 million pre-election ballots were cast in 47 states, and officials are expecting high turnout on Election Day, too, for the congressional, state and gubernatorial contests that will determine control of Congress and state legislative chambers.

In an election where early voting has been higher than in the last one, most will cast their ballots without issue on Tuesday.

State and local officials and voting rights advocates have raised the alarm that the political attacks have sparked an exodus of local elections officials in charge of the vote amid a marked rise in threats of violence against election workers.

Georgia’s Cobb County on Monday extended the deadline for roughly 1,000 absentee ballots to be turned in until November 14, after the ballots were not mailed out until just days before Election Day due to procedural errors in the election office.

Pre-canvassing Before Election Day: What Happens If You Don’t Obtain Your Vote Before 7 a.m.

Beyond the legal fights, elections officials are anticipating possible conflict with election deniers who have harassed and threatened officials over the 2020 election and prepared for aggressive monitoring of the upcoming midterm contest.

The weather is also an unpredictable variable: In Florida, Subtropical Storm Nicole is bearing down on the state and expected to bring rain and gusty winds to the state on Election Day before it could strengthen to a hurricane and making landfall Wednesday.

It can include checking voters’ signatures on the return envelopes, opening the envelopes, taking out the ballots, flattening and then grouping them into stacks ready for scanning.

These seemingly mundane but critical steps can take hours or days to complete if many people vote by mail. If you want to do this process before Election Day, the Bipartisan Policy Center would like to give you at least seven days.

Some states, however, have election laws in place that do not allow pre-canvassing to begin until that last day of voting. The key swing states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania can’t begin preparing until 7 a.m. local time on Election Day.